America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation (31 page)

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.

W
ithout 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.”

By the late 1950s, the Estée Lauder treatment line emerged as number three in the cosmetics industry behind Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden, companies that were then still run by the grande dames themselves. Lauder would pattern herself after these two pioneering businesswomen, each of whom would die at an advanced age in the mid-1960s. She even borrowed a few of their favorite sayings. Rubinstein’s “There are no ugly women, only lazy ones” became Lauder’s “There are no homely women, only careless women.” In awe of her idols, Lauder showed some uncharacteristic restraint around them. When she first met Madame Rubinstein at a ball at the Waldorf-Astoria, she conceded that the octogenarian’s face looked lovely. However, Lauder did insist that she could do wonders for her neck and sent her a Crème Pack a few days later.

Her son Leonard would be instrumental in helping her leapfrog over her rivals. In 1958, after completing a three-year stint in the Navy, he joined the company full-time, focusing on marketing and advertising. A Columbia business-school graduate, Leonard also created a research and development laboratory and brought in a new cadre of professional managers. In 1960, three quarters of a century after Henry Heinz, Estée Lauder made her first call on London’s Fortnum and Mason. After gaining a foothold in England, she conquered France and then the rest of the world. In the 1960s, she began rolling out a string of new brands such as Aramis—upscale men’s toiletries—and Clinique—a medically tested line of skin-care products. Like Heinz, she also believed in allocating previously unheard-of amounts of money to advertising and promotion—estimates have ranged from 30 to 60 percent of sales—a formula that also worked wonders for her. By 1995, when Lauder finally retired and the family-owned company went public, it controlled nearly half of the U.S. department store market, and annual sales were $3 billion, 40 percent of which came from outside the United States.

Despite the staggering success of the Estée Lauder Companies and all the accolades awarded to its founder—in 1998, she was the only woman who made it on to
Time
’s list of the top twenty business geniuses of the twentieth century—little reliable information is available about the dynamic entrepreneur who invented the beauty business as we know it. Lauder rarely spoke about herself, and when she did, she told tall tales that often contradicted one another. “I was not born in Germany, Czechoslovakia, Austria, or Hungary,” Lauder wrote in her 1985 autobiography,
Estée: A Success Story
. “I have read that I was born in all of these romantic places.” But she herself was the primary source for most of the misinformation disseminated in the various newspaper and magazine stories about her. “She was a terrible liar,” Marylin Bender, who covered business for the
New York Times
for three decades and often lunched with Lauder, told me. “Estée constructed a lovely past for herself. But that made sense because her business required her to appeal to rich people.” In the fall of 1985, just as two books on Lauder’s life—her autobiography and Lee Israel’s equally skimpy biography (which remain the only ones ever written)—were about to appear, the
New Yorker
noted that “Lauder keeps its corporate secrets and Estée Lauder keeps her private ones…she [has excelled] at garnering publicity…while maintaining a mystique. Many customers vaguely accepted her as some European aristocrat…or they confused her with the beautiful young women…in her advertisements.” These false notions were, of course, just what Lauder wanted people to believe.

The nearly eighty-year-old Lauder was a most reluctant author. She started her autobiography only after she learned that Israel, whose previous biography was a
New York Times
bestseller on journalist Dorothy Kilgallen, was plugging away and that there was nothing she could do to stop her. Like Kinsey and Lindbergh, Lauder was horrified by the idea of a biographer rummaging around in her past. In her case, she feared not so much the dredging up of her countless sexual escapades—though she had had a few—but the puncturing of the myths about her origins. As the
Wall Street Journal
reported in its article,
THE BOOK WORLD IS ABUZZ OVER LIVES OF ESTÉE LAUDER—AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND BIOGRAPHY RECOUNT DIFFERING TALES
, published in September 1985, several writers before Israel had attempted to write a biography, only to be “talked out of it” by some “good conversation” with the family, which may have been spiced with monetary inducements. Israel mentioned to the paper that she had received a message on her answering machine from someone representing the family, which offered her six figures to break her contract with Macmillan. When asked recently about that message, Israel told me in a phone interview that the financial offer was preceded by the words, “The old lady is very upset.” While Leonard Lauder acknowledged to the
Journal
that he had heard about the taped message, he denied that the family had anything to do with it. After Lauder’s death, Cindy Adams of the
New York Post
also revealed that she had once tried to tell her story, only to be deterred by the family’s lawyer, the late Roy Cohn. “I was parrying,” the columnist wrote in 2004, “with the smartest and the toughest.”