Shades of Fortune (44 page)

“To begin with, you have to understand that this is a business where newness is everything. You've got to keep introducing new things—new nail and lip shades, new creams, new fragrances. This year's new nail shade may not be all that different from last year's, but at least it has a new name, and looks a little different, and seems new. My grandfather understood this, and the Revsons understood it—they learned it from Grandpa. The Lauders are just now beginning to understand the importance of newness. I mean, Estée came out with something called Youth-Dew twenty-five years ago—a perfectly good fragrance, with a nice name. But when Estée introduced Youth-Dew, her market was women in their thirties and forties. That's the major market for all of us. This is a business about women—and men, too—wanting to stay looking young longer. And it's in their thirties and forties that Americans start worrying about losing their youthful looks and begin turning seriously to perfumes and cosmetics for help. We have to grab our customers during those golden years. But the trouble with Youth-Dew today is that women who started using the product twenty-five years ago are now in their fifties and sixties, and let's face it, Youth-Dew today is considered an old ladies' scent. Over at Lauder, they realize they're losing their younger market, and so now they're busily developing new products to try to recapture this market. You've got to keep moving forward in this business. You can't just sit back and enjoy the success of a certain product. And you can never go backward.

“But to get back to my father, and what he did, or what he tried to do. First of all, you have to remember that among the other tremendous problems he inherited was what we still refer to here as the Candied Apple Fiasco. Whenever we sense some sort of a problem brewing with a product, we still say, ‘Beware of the Candied Apple!' Or, ‘Is there a Candied Apple in the woodpile?' Candied Apple was a lip and nail shade that my grandfather introduced a couple of years before he died. It was a disaster. Who knows why? Sometimes there's no clear answer to why a product, or a color, just refuses to catch on, but Candied Apple was one of these. It just didn't fly, as we say in the trade. I still think the name is kind of cute, and the color was … well, it was the color of the candied apples they sell at carnivals. The shade seemed to have a lot of fun things going for it. The ads were full of roller coasters and merry-go-rounds and Ferris wheels. But the shade just would not move off the shelves. Maybe the name wasn't sexy enough, wasn't sophisticated enough. Maybe it sounded too gloopy and teenagey. Maybe the name reminded women of the acne set. Maybe it sounded too
digestive
. Who knows? But, whatever it was, the customers, as we say, stayed away in droves. Candied Apple was the Edsel of the cosmetics business.

“My grandfather blamed my father for the failure of Candied Apple, which was really unfair. My father had nothing to do with developing the shade, and the name was my grandfather's—the names were always his. But what happened was that, when they were spot-testing the products, my father brought some samples home to Mother, and Mother
loved
Candied Apple. She loved the color, and she loved the name. My father passed this fact along to my grandfather, and as a result of this one-woman sampling of public opinion, Grandpa immediately decided that Candied Apple was going to be the hit of all time. He immediately upped the advertising and promotion budget. He hired extra salesmen. He quadrupled the production order. And then, when Candied Apple fell flat on its face, he blamed Daddy for the enormous production overrun. That was the way Grandpa's mind worked. He could never take the blame for any business misjudgment
himself
. It had to be someone
else's
fault. In the case of Candied Apple, Daddy became the scapegoat—just for passing along the word that my mother liked the shade!

“It was ridiculous, it made no sense. As you know, my grandfather never had a very high opinion of my mother, never thought she was good enough for his precious oldest son. Why did her vote have so much weight in this particular matter? Who knows? Maybe he was looking for an omen of good fortune, and that was it. In this business, we're always looking for omens, portents. Charlie Revson would never hire anyone if the number on his license plate added up to thirteen. I'm superstitious, too. Why am I having my launch party for Mireille on the seventeenth? Because an astrologer told me that this would be the most auspicious date for me!

“Anyway, I won't say that the Candied Apple Fiasco was the sole reason for the horrible state of affairs the company was in when Grandpa died, but it certainly hadn't helped. And among all the other problems my father inherited when he took over the company were thousands and thousands of unsold tubes and bottles of damned Candied Apple sitting around in Miray warehouses, gathering dust, where they were already beginning to call it Rotten Apple. It wasn't just a question of changing the name and reintroducing the shade as something else. That's often done in this industry. Candied Apple had been given very distinctive packaging: each lipstick tube had a bright red apple on its cap, and the top of each polish bottle was also an apple shape. So, part of Daddy's plan to rescue the company in its emergency situation was to try to unload the Candied Apple overstock, to get rid of the loser. It made good sense to me at the time. Of course, I was desperately young then—barely twenty—and not very clever and knew none of the things about the beauty business that I know now. I was a babe in the woods, and I adored my father. To me, he was the handsomest, smartest, bravest man in the world—the knight in shining armor who was going to charge forth and save the company single-handedly. As I say, given hindsight and what I know now, I would probably have to revise that opinion. Daddy made one fatal mistake. What he tried didn't work, but it was a brave try.

“And you have to remember that, over the years, my father had been given fancy titles but no authority, no real power. All the final decisions were made by my grandfather. There are subtleties in this business that maybe my father hadn't grasped, but then how could he have? No one had ever consulted him on anything. My grandfather may have been a tough administrator, but he was a lousy teacher. After Grandpa died, Daddy had about two days to learn everything there was to know about the beauty business!

“Meanwhile, I'll always have to give Granny Flo credit for coming forward the way she did. God knows, without her help, we wouldn't possibly be where we are today. For all her orneriness, for all her contrariness—for her blow-ups like the one at my mother the night of my party—I have to forgive her and remind myself what she did at the time of that crisis, in 'fifty-nine and 'sixty. She proved herself to be a real stand-up lady. At the time, she had more guts than anybody.

“She immediately put all her properties up for sale, and the timing turned out to be just right. Madison Avenue was already becoming commercial north of Fifty-seventh Street, and Madison and Sixty-first is now an office tower. I have to give Michael Horowitz credit, too; he handled that sale brilliantly. His negotiations for the air rights over that corner piece were fantastic. He also made a beautiful deal for ‘Merry Song,' Granny's place in Bar Harbor. Where ‘Merry Song' used to stand, there are now four hundred and fifteen time-sharing condominiums, a shopping mall, and a marina for medium-sized boats—tacky-looking, but very profitable. Of course, Michael took his commissions on all these deals. He wasn't just doing this out of the kindness of his heart, but all these were good deals for Granny, and Granny turned over almost all the profits to my father, to help him keep the company from going under. I remember seeing her sitting there, at her desk in the little apartment she moved to at Thirty Park Avenue, just writing out these enormous checks!

“The yacht,
Mer et Son
, was more of a problem. It was something of a white elephant. The Arabs and the OPEC boys hadn't come into the market yet, and nobody wanted a big boat like that. Also, Granny and Grandpa hadn't been invited to join the Northeast Harbor Fleet Club, so
Mer et Son
had been lying at anchor for several years in the little cove at the foot of Granny's lawn. Her hull had become badly silted in, and she was covered with barnacles, and she was listing badly. She looked like hell, and she was probably filled with rats. Finally, Michael was able to make a deal with the U.S. Navy, who agreed to take her over as a training cruiser. No big profit there, of course, but there was a tax deduction, which was helpful.

“The
real
white elephant was ‘Ma Raison,' the Palm Beach house. It's the biggest house in Palm Beach, you know. It was Grandpa's final folly. Back in 1960, it went on the market for twenty-two million, but there were no takers. I mean, that house is just too big for
any
body … or almost anybody. The zoning laws down there prohibit that property from being broken up and developed. It can't be put to any commercial or public use. At one point, Michael came up with a scheme to present the house to the U.S. Government, as a winter White House for presidents or visiting foreign VIPs. The government didn't want it. The upkeep was too much. Over the years, we've kept dropping and dropping the price, but still nobody wanted it, and meanwhile the taxes were staggering. It sat there for over twenty years, minimally maintained, looking shabbier and shabbier. And there was another problem with that house. Its central bell tower, which has a beacon on it, was on the main flight path into the West Palm Beach airport. This made ‘Ma Raison' not just the biggest place in Palm Beach. It was also the noisiest. Right around five o'clock, when you'd think it would be nice to go out for a quiet drink on the terrace, the big jets would start piling in from the north. You couldn't hear yourself think.

“Meanwhile, we kept lowering the price. Finally, a couple of years ago, when the best offer we had was four million, Michael Horowitz offered four-point-two and bought it himself. God knows why he wanted it. He got it at a distress-sale price, of course, but four-point-two is better than nothing, and Granny is relieved of those god-awful taxes. And do you know what our smart little sometime friend Michael was able to do? He began putting pressure on the boys at the airport and got them to change their flight-approach pattern. You can do that sort of thing if you're as rich as Michael Horowitz.

“But I keep digressing from what my father tried to do.…”

The first stockholders' meeting of the Miray Corporation, with Henry Myerson as its new head, was held two days after the reading of Adolph Myerson's will in the boardroom at Miray's offices on Fifth Avenue. Only five members attended: Edwee, Nonie, Mimi, Granny Flo, and Henry himself. The Leo cousins, who had been notified of the meeting by telegram had not bothered to attend. Since the departures of Leo and Nate from the company in 1941, the cousins had never bothered to attend stockholders' meetings, and, today, they were of course unaware of the special gravity of the situation. The five Myersons sat around the big table, while Henry presided from the oversize chair that for nearly fifty years had been the royal seat of the company's founder.

“I don't need to remind you all of the crisis we face,” Henry began.

“Henny-Penny, your tie's
still
crooked,” his mother put in.

“Mother,
please,
” Henry said, almost angrily. “Your tie would be crooked, too, if you'd spent the last two days and two sleepless nights trying to make some sense out of the mess this company's in!”

“Well, at least sit up straight,” Granny Flo said. “Don't slump. Your father never slumped.”

“We face a crisis,” Henry continued, his face visibly perspiring, though the temperature outside had dropped into the teens and, among the emergency measures Henry had already ordered, the office thermostats had been lowered to sixty-five. “We face a crisis, and I'd like to outline to you the emergency measures I've already taken. The office staff here is being reduced by twenty-five percent, starting with those most recently employed, and the employees affected have already received their notices. The Miray sales staff in the field is being reduced by another twenty-five percent. Executives who have formerly enjoyed private secretaries will from now on use the services of the steno pool. The company employs a fleet of eleven limousines. This fleet is to be discontinued and the vehicles sold. From now on, executives will use local taxis to get about the city on business. Strict restrictions will be imposed on all business travel, and executives who have previously used first-class air travel will from now on fly economy. Similar restrictions will be applied to all business entertaining, lunches, and so on. The order for the Gulfstream corporate jet that my father placed five months ago has been canceled. Other cost-accounting measures, never imposed in my father's day, have already been put in place by me, including plans to lease out some five thousand square feet of unneeded office space on the northeast corner of the sixteenth floor. I have placed myself in charge of cost accounting. Finally, I have asked all staff at the executive level to volunteer to accept, at least temporarily, a twenty percent cut in salary. Needless to say, I was the first executive to so volunteer.”

There was a polite round of applause.

“But I don't need to tell you,” he went on, “that all these measures will have roughly the effect of applying a Band-Aid to a gunshot wound in the head. Other, much more drastic measures will need to be taken if we're going to survive as a corporate entity. These are the measures that I'm going to ask you to vote on here today.”

There was a suspenseful silence. “Well, tell us what they are, Henny,” Granny Flo said, tightening a knot in her needlepoint.

“What I'm going to propose to you is a three-point program,” he said. “First, I'm going to ask you to agree that all dividends on Miray stock be discontinued for an indefinite period of time, until this company begins to show some black ink on the bottom line.”