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

by Joshua Kendall

  Quoting from the sales spiel that she delivered in department stores across the country, she wrote in her autobiography: “‘Why do you spend so much for a Picasso? The linen under his painting costs two dollars and seventy-five cents, each jar of paint he used was perhaps a dollar seventy-five—perhaps the material cost a total of eleven dollars. Why, then, do you pay a small fortune for a small picture? You’re paying for creativity, that’s why.’” Remarkably, few customers, journalists, or industry analysts were troubled by her grandiose comparisons, and the cream flew off the shelves. This campaign, wrote British author Mark Tungate in his book, Branded Beauty: How Marketing Changed the Way We Look (2011), “combined all the best (or worst) attributes of beauty marketing: snobbery, emotional blackmail, the cult of celebrity, faux continental sophistication, and pseudo-science.” She had devised a magic formula, which would transform her industry. While Lauder was still a relatively small player—sales did not hit $1 million until 1960—rival firms were already beginning to copy her when developing and marketing new products.

  By 1965, sales were up to $15 million, as Re-Nutriv led to huge new income streams. In its new manufacturing plant on Long Island, the company also churned out large jars, which looked like Fabergé eggs, priced at a few hundred bucks a pop. Lauder also stuck tiny dabs in other products, such as face powder and lipsticks, which helped her justify the high prices for her “prestige brand.” In 1962, for example, she charged $3.50 for her new “French Peach” lipstick, which, as the New York Times ad noted, featured “the creamy richness of her Re-Nutriv formula.” That year, few other lipsticks ran anywhere near $3; Arden’s Regal Red Lipstick cost $2 and Revlon’s Lustrous Lipstick cost only $1.10. As a rule, retail prices for lipstick have always been based on higher markups than any other beauty product. As Andrew Tobias has reported, the Nail Man’s costs for Lustrous Lipstick came to only 9.6 cents per tube; her gross margins for those Re-Nutriv–laced lipsticks were, in all likelihood, also over 90 percent.

  Lauder plowed a sizable chunk of her excess cash into trophy real estate. As with other obsessives, her homes emerged as a vehicle through which she could express her love of organizing and collecting. In 1955, after reaping the first wave of Youth Dew profits, she moved out of her West End Avenue apartment and into her first Upper East Side town house, which, despite its gold-plated bathroom fixtures, she would later dismiss as “informal.” A few years later, she bought her first place in Palm Beach, a small Spanish-style dwelling located on Route Trail, then the least fashionable part of the tony town.

  Over the next decade, she upgraded. In 1964, she switched to a villa on the ocean in Palm Beach—“an English home, not a beach home,” as she was fond of saying. Three years later, she dropped $500,000 (about $10 million today) on a twenty-five-room, eight-bathroom, nine-fireplace town house on East Seventy-Fifth Street in Manhattan, which most visitors referred to as “a castle.” As the New York Times reported shortly after her move-in day, the living room, whose walls were draped with Flemish tapestries, was so massive that the grand piano in the corner “looked like an abandoned toy.” The powder room on the main floor was lined with shelves overflowing with her cosmetics—lipsticks, face powders, and rouges, as well as her Re-Nutriv Cream (fittingly enough, as it was “the cream that bought the house”). As she proudly reminded the Times, her crème of creams, whose price was then $20 an ounce, “is the most expensive in the world and is our greatest seller.” Of her rationale for leaving out all that product, she explained: “I want my guests to be able to do their faces over completely.” (That explanation may have been only half true; she probably also relished the chance to get in a little extra face touching.)

  By 1967, Lauder also owned a villa in Cannes, which she described in her autobiography as “immaculately clean.” According to the Boston Globe, the neatnik “liked lots of shine” in her homes; maids were constantly waxing her already waxed drawing room floors with furniture polish. Not one to deny herself any material comforts, Lauder would later acquire an apartment in London—the blue-and-white wallpaper in her bedroom was modeled on that used by Jefferson in Monticello—as well as a massive home with Corinthian columns on Long Island. But like Lindbergh, she felt more comfortable on the go than at any of her palatial homes stuffed with Chippendale furniture and Meissen china. As the late fashion maven Eleanor Lambert has stated, “Estée let her houses live her…she didn’t live in them.”

  By the early 1960s, Lauder had finally attained the vast wealth of which her public persona (“Estée Lauder”) had long been boasting and her private persona (“Esther Mentzer”) had long been dreaming. She now set her sights on developing the prominent social connections that she might have already had, had she actually descended from Viennese aristos. This step was all about business. “Her Palm Beach social life,” William Lauder told me, “embodied what the brand stood for.” The society pages constituted another theater in her ongoing war with her rivals such as Revlon—which, in the late 1960s, was still more than ten times the size of her company—and the fierce competitor dug in her heels. “The icons of fashion, those were the sophisticated people whom we were trying to reach,” said Michael Gibbons, a retired marketing executive who began his long career with the company in 1967.

  Of Lauder’s attempts to ingratiate herself with her rich and famous “targets,” Erica Titus Friedman, a frequent luncheon companion, has stated, “She tried too hard, but she was very determined.” Just as Lauder used gifts to win customers, she distributed baskets of her products to gain entry into the balls and benefits held at Palm Beach’s exclusive venues such as the controversial Everglades Club (which to this day has few, if any, Jewish members). In the mid-1960s, she reeled in the biggest fish of all—the Duchess of Windsor, whom she called “the most attractive woman in the world.” In Lauder’s version, they first met aboard an ocean liner and it was the Duchess who was eager to meet her: the Duchess had long been such a fan of hers that the Elizabeth Arden rep who made her up before parties used Estée Lauder products. But a more likely explanation, now widely accepted, is that their relationship began through a carefully orchestrated surgical strike; one day, just as the Duchess and her husband, the former King Edward VIII, were about to board a train bound for New York at the West Palm Beach station, Lauder “accidentally” bumped into her in front of a photographer, whose snapshot soon was transmitted around the world. However the bond was forged, it solidified quickly.

  Within a couple of years, Lauder was hosting the couple’s anniversary dinner and papers were reporting that her personal friend the Duchess does not “hesitate to test the newest Lauder products and tell [her] buddy if it’s good or bad.” Her social circle would also include Princess Grace of Monaco and her Palm Beach neighbor Rose Kennedy, a frequent visitor to her home for afternoons of tennis and a makeover.

  As a CEO, Lauder could appear flighty—in business meetings, she often rambled—but she was totally focused when she had to be. “She sees and absorbs everything,” a company executive once told Vogue. “You may think she has forgotten or not noticed, but when there is a scrap of information to fit in with a lot of others, it’s there—been there all along.” Michael Gibbons recalled a trip to Chicago with her in 1969 to open up a counter at Bonwit Teller, which had just completed its move across Michigan Avenue. “At a party at the store the evening before the opening, a Revlon executive was upset with its company’s location on the floor. Afterwards, at dinner, she told me and my colleagues, ‘They are going to move us.’ We did not think it possible. But she insisted that we go back after dinner. At 11:30 that night, we moved our booth back where it was originally supposed to go.”

  By the late 1960s, Lauder had handed off the day-to-day operations of the company to Leonard, then in his thirties. The working alliance between the self-described “stern taskmaster…[who] expected perfection…and then a little more perfection when perfection is offered” and her elder son was not always smooth. A decade earlier, on Leonard’s first
day on the job, Lauder announced that she and Joe were going on a two-month vacation to Florida; while Leonard was often jolted by her mercurial and demanding ways, after several years, they ironed out the kinks. She remained the company’s public face who had final say over all products—she hated false eyelashes, so they were nixed.

  In 1973, when the thirty-nine-year-old Leonard officially replaced her as president, he described himself to Marylin Bender as a cross between his parents. A perfectionist like his mother, he was driven by a fierce ambition that could “keep everyone on their toes.” To motivate his staff, Leonard would blurt out, “I want you nervous. I want you to be nervous. Are you nervous?” And like his father, he could “direct and organize vast logistical movements.” In contrast to Leonard, who said nothing publicly about the tension, Lauder alluded to “many heated discussions” in her autobiography. “My father,” William Lauder explained to me, “was her son as well as her business partner and rival. But the relationship was symbiotic. They both recognized that they needed each other. He could not do what he wanted without her, and she could not do what she wanted without him.”

  Both sons are chips off the old block. Ronald and Leonard also have obsessive traits, though Ronald has never been as excited about business as his elder brother. Ronald’s heart has always been in collecting. “I first became interested in art at thirteen,” he told me. “I guided my parents, who never had time to learn about it. I grew up around great style, and I knew what they liked.” The man who founded Manhattan’s Neue Galerie Museum for German and Austrian Art in 2001 bought his first canvas of the Austrian great Egon Schiele with his bar mitzvah money. As the New Yorker noted in its 2007 profile, “An Acquiring Eye,” this megacollector—Glenn Lowry, the director of the Museum of Modern Art, has called his private holdings “the finest collection of modern art assembled by an individual in the world today”—has “given himself the grand, cultured Viennese heritage to which Estée Lauder pretended.” While most of Leonard’s obsessionality has been plowed into the company, he, too, has dabbled as an art collector. He has made several donations of prominent American artworks to Manhattan’s Whitney Museum. Ever since the age of six—back when he was coping with the interregnum in his parents’ marriage—Leonard has also been accumulating postcards; he started by spending his five-cent allowance on five cards of the Empire State Building. At present, his collection, which he plans to donate to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, features 125,000 items encompassing numerous subgenres, such as artists’ postcards, sports postcards, advertising postcards, and fashion postcards. His late wife Evelyn, Leonard told the New Yorker in 2012, “often said my postcard collection was my mistress.”

  Estée Lauder wanted both her boys to work in the family biz, and in the mid-1960s, not long after finishing business school at Wharton, Ronald also came on board. In 1968, when she rolled out Clinique, a new line of medically sanctioned skin-care products, she named Ronald its executive vice president. Under his leadership, a decade later, Clinique’s sales came to $80 million, nearly 30 percent of the company’s total. After dabbling in politics in the 1980s—in 1983, he worked in the Reagan Defense Department as deputy assistant secretary, and in 1986 he was appointed U.S. ambassador to Austria—he spent a decade as chairman of Estée Lauder International. In 1995, Ronald also became chairman of Clinique—now the bestselling prestige makeup line in the United States and most of the 130 other countries in which it is sold—a position that he still holds. As peripatetic as his mother ever was, Ronald now also runs several businesses of his own, including a leading TV station in Central Europe.

  On October 16, 1979, the seventy-one-year-old Lauder, having already enjoyed a couple of decades of spectacular wealth and fame, was forced to endure fifteen minutes of terror. At five thirty that afternoon, three gun-toting intruders stormed past her maid and into her Manhattan mansion. Lauder immediately locked herself in her third-floor bedroom, but two of the robbers rushed up the stairs and kicked in the door, threatening to kill her if she did not cooperate. After one man smacked her across the face, she opened the two wall safes containing her jewelry. Though tied to a chair, a relatively unscathed Lauder made a rather gutsy move that could have been life-threatening. Wiggling around on the floor, she activated the silent alarm button that was hooked up to police headquarters. After noticing what she had done, the thieves collected their heist and immediately dashed out of the house. Two minutes later, the police arrived. As with other obsessives, Lauder’s nervous system worked backward. While too little to do could raise her anxiety level, too much to do—or even danger—could reduce it. The police sergeant who spoke to her that afternoon told the New York Post that she was “quite calm, unusually calm” about the robbery, in which she lost about a million dollars in jewelry as well as $6,000 in cash. “I’m not a bit disturbed,” she told the paper. This perfectionist would always pride herself on her emotional control. “They took a few things that were lying around,” she added, “but nothing important.” In her autobiography, however, she would finally acknowledge the truth, stating, “I gave them everything.” For the rest of her life, she would be protected by bodyguards.

  Three years later, Lauder was felled by another blow, one from which she would never fully recover. On January 15, 1983, the fifty-third anniversary of her first wedding, Joe collapsed and died during a dinner at Ronald’s Manhattan home. Lauder’s remarkable control over her public image (and the news media) came through loud and clear in the vague New York Times obituary. The paper of record was reduced to guesstimating her husband’s age, reporting that he was “in his 70s.” He was actually eighty.

  While many women of her generation were reluctant to reveal their age, Lauder’s desire to keep her birthdate hidden was extreme. As her grandson William told me, when he was carrying her passport on a trip to Austria in the mid-1980s, she insisted that he not take a peek. So determined was she to keep her secret that she also kept a tight lid on the age of other family members—namely, her husband and elder son. Leonard was under strict orders not to be open about his age, unless otherwise directed. As Lauder acknowledged in her autobiography, when asked, Leonard would reply, “I’ll have to ask my mother.…I’ll check on what I am this week and let you know.” In 1988, in an effort to keep her secret, she would ask her fifty-five-year-old son to paint his graying hair. The 1983 Times obituary also failed to mention where her husband’s burial took place. The venue, the Beth El Cemetery in Paramus, New Jersey, where her father, Max, had once roamed with his horses, may well have struck the family as too Jewish.

  The loss of her husband was overwhelming. Joe had been not just her spouse, but also her surrogate mother, who had given her the attention that she had never received from the anxious and overburdened Rose back in Corona. For the next several weeks, Lauder retreated to the upstairs bedroom of Ronald’s nearby Manhattan town house. Her nose, she figured, could help bring her out of her despair, and over the next couple of years, she put her energy into developing a new fragrance, Beautiful. As she was racing around the country during the launch in 1986, she told the New Yorker, “Hard work never killed anyone.…Smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone.…I found that out after Joe died.” But for the first time in her life, burying her emotions in her work was no longer working. “After 1986, she was meaningfully less active. At the time, we did not appreciate how much of an effect my grandfather’s death was still having on her,” William Lauder told me.

  From then on, her public appearances would be limited. In December 1988, Raisa Gorbachev, who was in Manhattan to attend an event at the United Nations, headed up to the thirty-seventh floor of the General Motors Building, where she sampled Beautiful and a few other perfumes. After their forty-five-minute meeting, Lauder, apparently frustrated because she did not get to dab her visitor, told the New York Times: “I want her to come back and talk about skin.” Two years later, when Leonard Lauder introduced Origins, a frail Lauder would head down to its retail outlet in S
oho with William, then the vice president of this line of natural skin-care products. “She loved standing behind the counter,” her grandson stated, “and waiting on customers.” By 1993, when she went to Florida for the last time, Alzheimer’s was starting to set in. “Both her mother and her sister, Renée, suffered from the disease. Her sister’s came quite early when I was still in my teens,” added William. Lauder would die, attended by nurses, in her Manhattan town house in 2004. She was ninety-five.

  By the end of this Queen of Beauty’s long reign, her family knew exactly how to defuse the rough edges of her obsessionality. In 1989, as the company was reshuffling its offices in the GM Building as part of an expansion—Lauder’s office was moved up from the thirty-seventh floor to the fortieth—Leonard was nervous about showing his mother the renovation. Relaying the story to me, a smiling William Lauder explained: “My father told one of his assistants, ‘Break something. Something that isn’t important.’ The next day, as my eighty-year-old grandmother was entering her new quarters, she stopped and snapped, ‘The door handle isn’t working. They didn’t do it right. That needs to be fixed right away.’ She then let out a big sigh of relief and was quiet for the rest of the day. Order was restored.”