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

by Joshua Kendall

  As sales of her products took off and Lauder received offers to run concessions at other salons, she needed to clone herself; as she discovered, standing behind a counter, she could touch only about fifty faces a day. “Girl to assist beauty specialist,” ran one of her early ads in the New York Times. “Interesting work with high-class clientele.” The face-touching army, the same one that circulates in department stores around the world today, was born. Just as Kinsey trained his staff when to push forward and when to pull back in interviews, Lauder taught the proper degree of assertiveness with customers. She instructed her assistants not to ask, “May I help you?” but to say, “I have something that would look perfect on you, madam. May I show you how to apply it?” Lauder, who liked to coin phrases as well as names, came up with “Telephone, Telegraph, Tell-A-Woman” to describe her word-of-mouth campaign that was instrumental in stoking sales of her products in those early years.

  Her husband suddenly had a new rival—her work. “Business,” Lauder later wrote, “marries you. You sleep with it, eat with it, think about it much of your time. It is…an act of love.” She would often leave Leonard at home with Joe and a maid to go on “working vacations” to swanky hotels, where she could dab faces poolside. Her jaunts in those days were limited mostly to Gatsby country on Long Island. In an effort to fit in, she would dress to the nines. “I knew,” she later mused, “I had to look my best to sell my best.” Dressing for success was to become an article of faith. (Decades later, as Cathie Black, the former head of the Hearst Magazines, noted in her memoir, Lauder would approach employees at her annual Christmas party and yank the back collar of their dresses to examine the label.) She also rarely went out hatless, explaining, “Try to walk in a hat, it makes you look like someone.” Like other obsessives, Lauder had a one-track mind. Business was everything. She never developed any hobbies or other interests. By the late 1930s, she began questioning whether she could stay married to Joe, who lacked her ambition. “When he wanted to talk,” she later wrote, “I’d usually be off in another world, thinking, projecting, planning…my mind awhirl.” In April 1939, she got a divorce.

  Still only thirty, Lauder moved with the six-year-old Leonard to Miami Beach. Over the next few years, the attractive, flirtatious, and impeccably dressed divorcée would date a series of older, high-powered men, a couple of whom were still married. One beau was the bachelor Charles Moskowitz—a top executive at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, dubbed by some gossip columnists as “Mr. MGM”—who, as she wrote in her autobiography, “showed me a world I’d never even imagined… Hollywood, stardom.” Another was Dr. John Myers of Palm Beach, a British oral surgeon who made a fortune manufacturing flanges. A man with multiple talents—he was a noted actor and painter—Myers also headed a nonprofit that supported the arts. His then twenty-something daughter, the late Jeannette Vitkin, who later went on to head the Myers Foundation, was startled when her father’s new girlfriend gave her face the once-over. “You shouldn’t wear that lipstick,” Lauder could not help but mention. “It’s not right for you.” Lauder was also seen arm-in-arm with Arnold van Ameringen, a Dutch-born head of a big perfume company, who later became the head of International Flavors and Fragrances. Lauder and Ameringen stayed friendly after their break-up, which was caused by his unwillingness to leave his wife. In the early 1950s, Ameringen provided considerable financial support to her growing business; this perfume tycoon may well also have passed on some of the ingredients of Youth Dew.

  After a three-year separation from Joe, Lauder no longer wished to play the field. To her credit, she realized that success meant little without stable human connections, and they got remarried. “Look for a sweet person. Forget rich,” as she later advised others, was the principle that guided her. Ronald, born in 1944, was the product of her return to Joe for a second lap around the track. Lauder thus steered clear of the excesses exhibited by other beauty tycoons such as her chief rival in the 1960s and early 1970s, Charles Revson. Known as “the Nail Man,” the founder of Revlon was a fellow obsessive, who also lived for his business, which doubled as his religion. As Andrew Tobias revealed in his juicy biography, Fire and Ice (1976), Revson ran roughshod over everyone, including three ex-wives, one whose name he couldn’t remember, countless short-term lovers, and “hundreds of shell-shocked, verbally assaulted, overworked…executives,” many of whom he wiretapped. That was the road not taken by Lauder. Nobody could stand Revson. In contrast, Lauder could maintain a genial demeanor and was capable of cordial relationships. “She was a family person, and I could relate to her. That was certainly not the case with Revson,” Marylin Bender told me.

  Agnes Ash had a similar take. “Estée was no phony. I was fond of her,” stated Ash, who enjoyed their leisurely lunches during her long tenure as editor of the Palm Beach Daily News. “You could just sit and talk about your family and career; she would give wonderful tips about who you should get to know.” Given Ash’s influence in the community, Lauder’s kindness was not unconnected to the promotion of her brand. Lauder also turned into a tipmeister for Mary Randolph Carter, beauty editor of Mademoiselle. “The first time I met Estée Lauder,” Carter wrote in 1976, “I was eight months pregnant, so we talked a lot about babies and mothering. It was a happy meeting and she left me with all kinds of advice and good wishes.” When asked about her relationship with Lauder in a recent phone interview, Carter, now the creative director for Ralph Lauren, said, “She could be a bear, but not with me. You felt taken care of when you went to her office for a new product launch. As soon as she saw my baby bulge, she made sure that I had a glass of water or juice.”

  However, while Lauder, unlike Revson, could come across as genuine and concerned, connecting was always something that she had to work at. Easygoing and relaxed with others she was not. In contrast to her two sons, who both idealize her as an all-loving mother, her grandchildren are well aware that her solicitousness could be awkward, if not downright irksome. “I was staying at her cottage in the south of France when I was about twenty,” Leonard’s son William recalled. “There wasn’t much to do and I wanted to go to the beach with my friends. She started asking all kinds of questions about where we were going. Fortunately, my grandfather was there to calm her down.”

  Just as Clara Kinsey mothered Alfred, Joe Lauder would mother Estée. But in contrast to the sex researcher, the beauty-tycoon-in-the-making would not take her spouse for granted. Instead she became deeply appreciative. “I knew I needed him,” she would later write, “not only for emotional support but to keep me in line financially.” After the remarriage, the number-savvy Joe officially abandoned his own career and began managing the practical aspects of her business. But while Joe encouraged her to fulfill her dreams, he had his limits. Thirty years later, when President Nixon offered her the ambassadorship to Luxembourg, Joe told her, “If you go, you go alone. I won’t go along to carry your bags.” She got the message and declined.

  In 1946, Lauder launched her company with Joe’s savings and a loan from her father. With the war now over, she no longer had to worry about the shortages of such critical supplies as plastic and glass as well as fats and oils. She and Joe set up a small factory in a former restaurant on West Sixty-Fourth Street. She initially sold her wares only at beauty salons and through the mail, but she soon set her sights on the department store where customers shopped using a new tool—the store credit card, which allowed for impulse buying (bank-issued cards such as Visa and MasterCard were not yet available). But discount outfits such as Macy’s or Gimbel’s would not do. She aimed only for the high-end stores, and Saks Fifth Avenue was the top of the line.

  Her characteristic persistence would come in handy; the store’s cosmetics buyer, Robert Fiske, was, as she later wrote, inundated by “experimental merchandisers who would sell their souls to sell from Saks.” Lauder kept bugging Fiske every which way. Every Wednesday and Friday afternoon for weeks on end during buying hours, she sat outside his office along with fifty other merchants. She put pres
sure on him by repeatedly asking her clients to call the store. She also touched the faces of as many women with ties to Saks as she could find; her prey included an assistant buyer whose skin had been scarred in an auto accident, and the daughter of a prominent executive, whose acne crisis had forced her to wear a little veil over her skin. And when that full-court press did not achieve any results, Lauder tried an end run. In 1948, after a speech at a benefit luncheon at the nearby Waldorf-Astoria, she handed out to the audience free $3 lipstick in metal cases—a fancy touch at the time, as the war had led to the widespread use of plastic tubes. “As the luncheon broke up,” Fiske later noted, “there formed a line across Park Avenue and across Fiftieth Street into Saks asking for these lipsticks, one after another. It convinced us that there was a demand for the Lauder product.” Sold, he placed his first order for $800 worth of merchandise. “Breaking that first, mammoth barrier,” Lauder later recalled, “was perhaps the single most exciting moment I have ever known.” Her first order sold out in two days. By 1950, she was also in Manhattan’s Bonwit Teller and Lord and Taylor.

  Lauder still faced enormous challenges. In the late 1940s, as the New York Times reported, the roughly $1 billion beauty business was America’s eighty-fifth largest industry in size, but the second largest in advertising expenditures. And she had a limited budget; in the company’s first year, total sales were just $50,000. Over the next few years, its only print ads were those subsidized by department stores. The name Estée Lauder first appeared in the New York Times in April 1948, when Saks hailed “Estée Lauder beauty props” as “the pretty cosmetics of the…perfectionist making.” By the end of the decade, with about $50,000 in the bank, Lauder tried to hire a major New York City advertising agency to spread the word about her brand. But when her paltry savings did not allow her to get a foot in the door, she was forced to improvise. Confident that customers would snap up her products if only they tried them, Lauder gave away samples and more samples. The businesswoman who as a girl had been desperate to earn and keep her parents’ love had developed a remarkable knack for forging connections with the consumer. Her competitors thought she was nuts. An executive at the perfume manufacturer Charles of the Ritz muttered, “She’ll never get ahead. She’s giving away the whole business.” But she was on to something. “People trooped in to get the free sample,” Leonard Lauder has stated, “liked it and bought it again.” She also recruited new customers by devising the clever innovations Gift with Purchase (G with P) and Purchase with Purchase (P with P), which have since emerged as standard operating procedure in countless industries. Even after the company began investing heavily in print advertising in the early 1960s, it kept passing out all the freebies.

  Premium department stores would always remain her focus. “We’re prestige,” Lauder told the New York Times in 1967, “and we refuse to go into stores that are not prestige.” She nixed the idea of following her competitors such as Revlon that sold products at drugstores and supermarkets. According to Lauder, while wide distribution might increase sales in the short-term, it inevitably backfired over time. In the 1980s, as a guest lecturer at a Fashion Institute of Technology class on the cosmetics industry, she stated: “What I’d really like to do, if I could get away with it, is cut my distribution by a third.” Such a shift, she was convinced, could increase her profitability by 50 percent. “Less is more,” she emphasized. Today, the company is still using the same playbook.

  “The founders, who were my parents, had two very simple ideas,” Leonard Lauder recently noted, “product quality and narrow distribution to high-end retailers. We never went mass.”

  After first conquering Manhattan, Lauder faced the challenge of placing her brand not in more types of stores, but in more of the same kind of stores. To take the rest of the country, throughout the early 1950s she took to the rails. Like Jefferson, Lauder had her share of phobias, and one was a fear of heights, which then prevented her from flying. (But this she would eventually conquer, and by the late 1960s, she was working without any apparent discomfort in her new office on the thirty-seventh floor of the new General Motors Building.) Her compulsion to sell turned her family inside out. She left her two sons in the care of a maid and her husband, who was now also working seven days a week from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. Leonard, then attending the Bronx High School of Science, would make afternoon runs on his bicycle to deliver goods to Saks from the firm’s two small plants in Upper Manhattan. (Since her elder son was already versed in every aspect of the business, Lauder considered letting him run the company while she took a vacation with her husband; but the adolescent came down with the chicken pox, forcing her to abandon the idea.) Though Lauder would not admit it, due to her restless temperament, like Kinsey and Lindbergh, she may well have preferred being on the road to staying at home. One year, she was away twenty-five weeks. While neither of her boys would ever complain, her frequent absences presumably led to considerable confusion and anxiety.

  She began the 1950s by opening her two-foot-long counter at the Neiman Marcus flagship store in Dallas. “Estée Lauder came in without an introduction,” the late Stanley Marcus, who took over as company president that same year, told the New Yorker a couple of decades ago. “Barged her way in. She was a cyclone on the selling front. She’d outsell me any day.” After countless phone calls and considerable cajoling, the store finally let her open for business on January 2, 1950. On New Year’s Day, Lauder appeared on a Dallas radio show at 8:15 a.m., the only time she could get. Remarkably, in her autobiography, she boasted of the tall tale that she told that morning: “I’m Estée Lauder just in from Europe with the newest ideas for beauty.…Do let me personally show you how to accomplish the newest beauty tricks from Paris and London.” (At the time, the only connection between her and France was the accent aigu in her faux first name.) “Start the New Year with a new face,” was her sign-off. It worked. Wearing her signature hat with a pink rose, she was inundated by customers early the next day. Her lipstick sold out so fast that she instructed her salesgirl: “Go ahead and sell the tester!”

  During the week that she spent in each town opening up a new store, she followed a carefully honed protocol that relied heavily on her obsessions and compulsions. Before attaining vast wealth, she owned just one or two expensive outfits, which she wore over and over again, and everything about her appearance was perfect, including, of course, her personal hygiene. “I’d always be immaculate,” she later wrote. “If you looked shabby or tired or messy, no one in the world would be interested in your opinion on what sells in the beauty field.” She would meet with and touch the face of every beauty editor in town. Behind her perfectly decked-out counters—making the most of every inch, the detail-oriented designer turned each one into “a tiny, shining spa”—Lauder would also touch the face of every customer in sight. And she was goaded on by her relatively mild number fetish. While she wasn’t a rabid counter like Jefferson, Heinz, Dewey, or Kinsey, this hard-nosed businesswoman still enjoyed doing a certain amount of tallying. “Measure your success in dollars, not degrees” would emerge as a favorite maxim. For each day, she set monetary goals—typically a nice round number such as $1,000. Toward the end of business one afternoon in Houston when she was making her first foray into the Sakowitz store, she took off her shoes and counted her receipts. Her take stood at $998, which threw her into a temporary tizzy. “Oh no,” she said to herself, as she rushed to meet a woman who had just made it through a closing door. Quickly slipping her shoes back on, she started hawking some eye cream that sold for $2.95. In an effort to clinch the sale, she startled the customer by announcing that the cream would smooth out the wrinkles on the side of her mouth. “That did it,” Lauder later wrote. “Letting my shoes drop off, I sank into my chair and grinned my most victorious grin.”

  But like other obsessives, Lauder would rarely stay put for long. “She rests,” a colleague once told Mademoiselle, “by doing something else hard.”

  To use a beauty metaphor, Youth Dew, first int
roduced at Bonwit Teller in 1953, would lay the foundation for Lauder’s worldwide cosmetics empire. By the mid-1950s, the perfume, which she would compulsively spritz wherever she went—including elevators and restaurants—would generate about 80 percent of her sales at department stores. “It was impossible to get rid of the smell. It lasted forever,” recalled Marylin Bender. And Lauder would mine this core characteristic to bring Youth Dew (and thus her entire treatment line) to the land of Chanel. When the buyer at the Galeries Lafayette in Paris would not see her, Lauder spilled a considerable amount on the floor. Over the next couple of days, as the fragrance lingered, customers kept asking about the source, and the department store soon had no choice but to carry it. Spritzing became a permanent part of her playbook. “Whenever I have a fragrance promotion,” she wrote in 1985, “I ask my salespeople to spray some scent on the counters, and in the air to attract the customer.…My little Parisian ‘accident’ set the stage.”

  With Youth Dew putting her on the map, Lauder felt emboldened to make an experiment. In 1957, she brought out a moisturizing cream called Re-Nutriv—the moniker highlighted its supposedly medicinal properties—for which she charged a staggering $115 ($950 today) for a sixteen-ounce (one-pound) jar. While critics insisted that the sticker price would scare away customers, she sensed that the opposite might be true. Her gamble was a radical move. Until then, all her products had been moderately priced; Youth Dew Bath Oil, for example, cost from $3.75 to $22.50, depending on the size of the container. Likewise, the upscale creams manufactured by competitors such as Helena Rubinstein typically retailed for under $30 for an eight-ounce jar.

  As Lauder predicted, her “Crème of Creams” elicited lots of free media coverage precisely because of its sky-high price. She also took out full-page ads in Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue featuring a Hitchcockesque model under the headline, “What Makes a Cream Worth $115?” (Lauder had not yet begun hiring her string of famous blonde and blue-eyed models, such as Karen Graham, the company’s official representative in the 1970s and 1980s, whom the public often assumed was her.) By way of explanation, the accompanying text alluded to “the rare perception of a woman like Estée Lauder who knows almost better than anyone how to keep you looking younger, fresher, lovelier than you ever dreamed possible.” It would be hard to contest this assertion, as Rose Mentzer’s youngest daughter had indeed been thinking of little else for decades. The ad also referenced some rare ingredients, such as turtle oil and royal jelly, and twenty secret ingredients, to which only members of the family were privy. The claim of high production costs noted by her copywriters, however, was less well grounded, as Lauder herself would acknowledge.