Shades of Fortune

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  “You mustn’t think thoughts like these, Mimi,” he said. “You mustn’t let yourself. There’s nothing you or I could have done that would have made things any different. Nothing either of us could have done differently would have changed anything.”

  “Oh, yes,” she sobbed. “I think there was.”

  A crack of light appeared in their bedroom doorway, and then the silhouette of the toddler Badger appeared in the frame of light from the hallway outside. Rubbing his eyes, he said, “Mommy? Daddy?”

  “Come here, Badger,” Brad said, patting the bed. “Everything’s all right.” He reached out and lifted the little boy into the bed beside them. “Everything’s all right,” he said again. “Would you like to sleep in our bed tonight, Badger-buddy? Your Mommy and Daddy love you very much, Badger-buddy, and every day we love you more and more, Badger-buddy, yes we do.…”

  And so, four days later, her father’s simplest of funerals behind them, the little family group had met again in George Wardell’s office in the Lincoln Building. This time, there were only five of them: Mimi and Brad, Nonie and Edwee, and Alice. Granny Flo had not been able to bring herself to attend, nor had she attended the funeral. She had been too devastated by the loss of her firstborn, and best-loved, child. Our little group, Mimi remembers thinking, grows smaller and smaller.

  The will was read. Like the funeral service, it was simple and brief, barely one page in length. Her father had rewritten it, it seemed, simplifying everything, just a month before his death. A third of Henry Myerson’s estate was left to his widow, and two thirds were bequeathed to Mimi. There were no other special bequests.

  “Of course,” George Wardell said with a deep sigh when he finished reading it, “there are many problems that I’m sure you are aware of. Everything, at the moment, is entailed by various lawsuits that have been instituted by certain of your cousins. We can expect Henry’s estate to be in litigation for some time to come. The question becomes: What is to become of the Miray Company, which now, unfortunately, has no one to run it? Most unfortunate.”

  At first, none of them said anything.

  “Mr. Moore,” George Wardell said, “have you any suggestions?” Clearly, George Wardell had selected Brad as the one most capable of assuming any sort of mantle of family leadership.

  Brad whistled softly. “Is it … Chapter Eleven?” he said at last.

  “Yes, most unfortunately, yes,” George Wardell said. “That is exactly what I have been thinking. I can see no other solution, I’m afraid. Therefore, with all of your permissions, I would like to institute bankruptcy proceedings on the part of Miray. Very sad, but there isn’t a man in this country who would want to try to run this company now.”

  “Not a man in the country?” Mimi said.

  “Well, perhaps that’s putting it a little strongly,” George Wardell said. “Let me say that no man in his right mind would want to take over the burden of this company in its present financial state.”

  “What about a woman?” Mimi said quietly.

  “What?” said her aunt Nonie sharply. “What are you talking about, Mimi? What woman?” Nonie was still all in black, her face heavily veiled.

  “Me,” Mimi said.

  “Don’t be absurd,” Nonie said. “You don’t know anything about business. Besides, you have a baby.”

  “Now, wait a minute,” Brad said, sitting forward in his chair. “Let’s hear what Mimi has to say.” He then began firing questions at her, and though they were difficult questions, she would always be grateful to him for asking them, because he had been the first one to take her seriously.

  “Tell me,” he said, “what’s the first thing you’d do if you had the company—the very first thing?”

  “I’d reposition the products back into an upscale market, back into the boutiques and specialty stores.”

  “But the name Miray is now associated with dime stores and supermarkets. How would you bring such a change about?”

  “I’d change the name. I’d change it to ‘Mireille,’ spelled the way I spell my name.”

  “But yours is an unusual name. French. Most people wouldn’t know how to pronounce it.”

  “I’d use television. The beauty industry hasn’t really explored television yet. We’ve stayed pretty much with the fashion and shelter magazines. But when they hear the name on television, and see it on the screen, they’ll know how to pronounce it soon enough. You see,” she went on eagerly, sitting forward in her chair, “I haven’t just been sitting around idly doing nothing while my father ran this company. I’ve been studying this business and doing a lot of reading and research. This is essentially a fashion business, and things go in and out of fashion. Just as there always has to be something new in fashion, there also has to be something new in cosmetics. Remember leg makeup? That was big a few years ago, but hardly anybody uses it now. With each new fashion season, there’s got to be a new makeup fashion. One year, the emphasis may be on lips. The next year it could be eyes, the next year hair colorings. You see, I’ve got lots of ideas that I’d like to try out.”

  “And how would you propose to finance all this?” Brad asked her.

  “I’d go down to Wall Street. I’d find some young and hungry and ambitious investment banking firm who’d be willing to underwrite us, and take our stock public. I’d raise the money that way.”

  “And then what would you do?” her husband asked her. “What would you do next?”

  “Then,” Mimi said, “I’d go out and call on the stores. I’d butter up the buyers. I’d try to get them to let me set up my displays in whatever little corner of the store they can give me. I’d walk up and down the aisles myself, with my little tray of samples, passing them out to customers. I’ve also had another idea: a free gift for every purchase. With every purchase of a ten-dollar lipstick, the customer gets a coordinated bottle of polish—or eye shadow or eyeliner—free. No one’s ever done that before. It’s just a new wrinkle on the old practice of sampling, of course, but it’s new, because the customer first has to buy something before she gets the free sample. And I think it would work. The buyers and the merchandise managers will like it because it will bring traffic into their departments. It will build goodwill for the stores. Gradually, they’ll repay me with bigger and better display space, and I’ll repay them with gift samples for their wives and girlfriends. In my display space, I’ll give beauty demonstrations: doing customer’s makeup, free, telling her what shades suit her coloring and complexion best, and so on. In other words, I’d work hard, damn hard, until I got to the point that when a woman thinks of cosmetics, she’ll think of Mireille.”

  “And then what would you do?” Brad had persisted.

  “Then,” she said with a smile, “I’d just keep on doing new things—new products, new product areas. This is a business where new is everything—new, new, new!”

  “This is all too absurd,” Nonie said. “Do you mean to say you’d abandon your darling little baby boy to do all that? It’s absurd. Alice, she wants to abandon your only grandchild!”

  “Badger won’t be abandoned, Nonie,” Brad snapped. And then, “I say let’s give her a chance.”

  “Yes, a chance,” she said. “Give me a year. Just see what I’ll do in a year.”

  And that was how it all began.

  From Philip Dougherty’s column in the New York Times, June 3, 1962:

  GIFT-FOR-PURCHASE NOTION IS A HIT

  Little knots of customers gathered around a particular cosmetics counter at Saks Fifth Avenue today. This was where the newly christened Mireille line of beauty products was displayed, and where the shopper discovered that for every Mireille product she purchased, she could take home another—free. This innovation in the time-worn practice of “sampling” in the beauty industry was unique in another way. The free sample was not a tiny miniature containing enough of a particular elixir for one or two applications. It was a full-size tube, or jar, or bottle of the elixir itself.

  “Mireille,�
� a homophone for Miray (its maker), is also the name of Miray’s new president, Mireille “Mimi” Myerson, granddaughter of the company’s founder. The Saks shoppers were doubly pleased today—not only with their free gifts, but with a chance to meet and visit with the lovely 24-year-old lady executive herself. Miss Myerson, it should be noted, provides an excellent walking advertisement for the efficacy of her various beauty and skin-care products.

  “Have you always used these products?” a shopper asked her. “Ever since I was tall enough to see into a mirror,” Miss Myerson replied with a laugh.

  Mireille, Mireille, on the wall, who is fairest of us all? Saks shoppers seemed to have decided today.

  “Something for your wife or a special woman friend?” she said to the dark-suited man who approached her counter at the crowded store.

  “I have no wife, but there is a special woman,” he said.

  “What’s her coloring?”

  “Blond,” he said.

  “Then I’m sure she’ll love this shade,” she began, reaching for a lipstick.

  “Like you. Polished-silver eyes.”

  She looked up at him and realized it was Michael.

  “You’re blushing, kiddo,” he said, and winked at her.

  “I’m sure all this publicity creates goodwill,” she said to Brad that evening at the dinner table, “but the problem is still cash flow. After all, every free gift we give away represents a lost sale.”

  “What about your idea of making a public offering of stock in the company?”

  “Are my figures good enough to appeal to an underwriter?”

  “There’s always commercial paper,” he said.

  “Commercial paper?”

  “Commercial paper is like a promissory note,” he said. “Think of it as a post-dated check. If you were to write a check for a hundred dollars, dated six months from now, you’d have trouble getting a hundred dollars for it today. But you might find somebody who’d give you ninety dollars for it. On the gamble that, in six months, you’d have the money in the bank to cover it. Of course, it’s risky, but there are investment houses who specialize in commercial paper issues. Right now, commercial paper is being discounted at between eight and ten percent. You might think of going the commercial paper route.”

  “Hmm,” she said thoughtfully, “it does sound risky.”

  “The underwriter who gives you ninety dollars for your check hopes he can find somebody who’ll give him ninety-two dollars for it, and so on. Everybody’s betting on the possibility that you’ll have the cash by the time the note comes due. Don’t try this with personal checks, by the way. It’s against the law. But in banking it’s done all the time.”

  “Very interesting,” she said.

  “If you decide to go that route, talk to Goldman, Sachs. They’re tops when it comes to trading commercial paper.”

  “Do you know anybody there, Brad?”

  “Not a soul, I’m afraid. But I do know that old Laz Goldman still calls all the shots down there. He’s well into his seventies, but he’s still very much in charge. Why not talk to him?”

  “Yes,” she said quietly. “Yes.”

  “The only other thing I know about him is that he’s the most bereaved widower in the world. His wife died a couple of years ago, and he’s been building shrines to her memory ever since.”

  That night, she had pulled Brad’s copy of Who’s Who in America from the bookshelf and read:

  GOLDMAN, LAZARUS, inv. banker; b. N.Y.C., Aug. 20, 1889; s. Marcus and Esther (Loeb) G.; B.A. Harvard Univ. 1910; m. Fannie Beer (dec.), June 12, 1918 …

  The biographical sketch continued with the names of the couple’s five children, Mr. Goldman’s various awards and achievements, the list of his clubs and affiliations, and concluded with the notation: “Donor (1960) of The Fannie Beer Goldman Memorial Pavilion, Mt. Sinai Hospital, N.Y.C.” This, clearly, was one of the shrines Mr. Goldman had erected to his dead wife.

  And suddenly, from some small niche in her memory, something floated into her mind, and she read through the paragraph carefully again. In 1955, in honor of her grandparents’ fortieth wedding anniversary, her grandfather had privately published a volume of their wedding photographs, and everyone in the family had been given a copy. She had never done more than give this album a casual glance. Now she searched the shelves eagerly for her copy. Finding it, she lifted it carefully out, a heavy volume, bound richly in white Morocco, embossed in gold:

  OUR WEDDING BOOK

  Adolph Myerson

  and

  Fleurette Guggenheim Myerson

  January 5, 1915–January 5, 1955

  She flipped quickly through the pages. First were photographs of “Our Parents,” her diminutive great-grandfather Myerson, looking frightened behind thick glasses and a walrus moustache, and his equally diminutive wife, wearing what was obviously her “best” dress; and the imposing senior Guggenheims, he in a Prince Albert frock coat, and she all in lace with her considerable poitrine slung with ropes of pearls. Then there were photographs of the bride and groom, stiffly posed, he with his familiar Van Dyke, and Granny Flo, looking incredibly young—almost childlike—in her veil and wedding gown, low-bodiced, surpliced, decorated with appliquéd roses and ribbon bows, its long train swirled at her ankles.

  Next came a section titled “Our Groomsmen”—more seriouslooking men in morning coats and high, stiff collars. Then came photographs of “Our Bridesmaids,” and Mimi found what she wanted.

  Now she was seated in the office of the great Mr. Lazarus Goldman himself at 43 Exchange Place, where he sat in a swivel chair behind an old-fashioned rolltop desk. He was in his shirtsleeves, wearing sleeve garters, and from the ceiling a green-shaded hanging lamp shone down on his round bald head. His office smelled of dust and old documents and looked as though nothing had been changed in it for at least fifty years. Even his telephone was of the old-fashioned upright variety, and a ticker-tape machine, of approximately the same vintage, burst into periodic clatter in one corner. His face remained expressionless as Mimi delivered her presentation.

  “And finally,” she said, “I plan to develop a line of men’s toiletries. I firmly believe that cosmetics for men, since we are becoming such a youth-oriented culture, are going to be a part of the wave of the future. Traditionally, of course, it has always been assumed that the only men who used cosmetics and scents were homosexuals.”

  “You mean pansies?” he said.

  “Well, yes. And, by tradition, the only fragrance a man would buy in, say, an after-shave, was something called Old Hemlock, or English Leather, or Woodspice. A whole mythology has developed over which fragrances are masculine and which are feminine. Piney and spicy fragrances are masculine, but floral scents are feminine. But it makes no sense. Why should both lemon and lime be considered masculine scents, while orange is considered feminine? Meanwhile, even the best men’s after-shaves are ninety-six percent alcohol and only four percent perfume. That’s why they sting, and the stinging is supposed to be good for the skin because the skin feels so good when the stinging stops!” She paused to see whether he would chuckle over this anomaly, but he did not. “But our research has shown that more and more men—masculine, nonhomosexual men—are dabbing themselves with a bit of their wives’ perfume after they apply their after-shave or talc—just to make themselves smell a little better. Secretly, men want more fragrance in the products they use. Therefore, my idea is to develop a fragrance with a non-sexually-oriented name that would appeal to men. Naturally, a man would hesitate before buying, or using, an aftershave called Apple Blossom. But if it had a name such as Persuasion, or Undercurrent, which had no particular sexual connotation, and if it smelled just wonderful—even of apple blossoms—the name could be sold to the ruggedest of he-men. The market is out there, Mr. Goldman, and I’ll leave you with one last thought. Though the market for scented beauty products has never been greater, only fifty-six percent of the male population buys any beauty products at all. The
other forty-four percent is what I’m going after.”

  Making a steeple of his fingers, he tipped his chair backward and stared upward into the green-shaded ceiling lamp. For several minutes he said nothing. Then he said, “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-seven,” she said, lying a little.

  “And you say all men are secretly pansies.”

  “I didn’t say that, Mr. Goldman. I’m just saying that my research shows that men want more fragrance in the products they use, and will buy them if they’re given more generic, non-sexually-associated names.”

  He waved his hand. “We have recently, successfully, underwritten an issue such as you suggest for the General Motors Corporation,” he said. “However, I think you will agree with me, Miss Myerson, that your company is a far cry from General Motors. A far cry.”

  “My company has great promise, Mr. Goldman.”

  “Does it? What makes you think so? You are in the cosmetics business, a business subject to the whims of fashion. No matter what this year’s fashions are, Americans will always purchase automobiles.”

  “Americans will always purchase cosmetics,” she said.

  “Yours is also a highly competitive business. There are only four major manufacturers of motor cars in America. But there are dozens and dozens of little cosmetics firms like yours.”

  “Miray was big once. I’m going to make it big again.”

  “Are you? What makes you think so?”

  “Because, Mr. Goldman, I happen to think I’ve got what it takes!” She leaned forward in her chair for emphasis.