Shades of Fortune (24 page)

Anyway, Leo thought he should get all the credit for it. He'd say, “Where would you be if I hadn't put the whatchamacallit in it, the chemical that makes it quick-drying? Where would you be without me, Mr. Big Shot?” And Adolph would say, “And where would
you
be if I'd let you throw the whole batch out, like you wanted to do? Where would you be if I hadn't seen the possibilities?” They'd argue like that all day long, and it would make my husband crazy. He'd come home at night and read to me from his diary about how Leo was making him crazy. I remember a lot of days where the diary began with “How many times did Leo make me crazy today?”

Anyway, in those days there was a lot of dirty work in our business—a lot of dirty work at the crossroads. In the nineteen twenties, particularly. There were payoffs. Under-the-counter payoffs. You'd pay a store owner, or one of his clerks, to display your products in the front of the store, or on top of the counter, or along the center aisle, and to push your competitors' product into the back, where it wouldn't be seen. Of course the competition did the same thing, and so the payoffs got bigger and bigger if you wanted your brands to get a good display in a store. Some people say it still goes on today. I wouldn't know. You'll have to ask Mimi about that, but I'll bet she won't tell you. I don't know if it's exactly against the law, but it's dirty business.

I'll tell you how some store owners worked. The Miray salesman would come into a store, complain about his display, make the payoff, and bingo! Up would go a big, fancy display of Miray right inside the front door. Half an hour later, a salesman from Revlon or one of the others would come into the same store, complain about his display, make the payoff, and bingo again! Down would come the Miray display, and up would go Revlon's in the same spot! This could happen a dozen times a day! People complain about the cost of cosmetics. They say a night cream that retails fifty dollars has only a few cents' worth of ingredients in it. They say the rest of the cost is for packaging and advertising, but that's not true! It's not packaging and advertising that push up the cost, it's the payoffs! My husband explained it all to me, how it worked. It was all in his diary, how much he paid off, and who to, to get his products displayed at
all
.

That was one reason why, in the late nineteen twenties I think it was, my husband decided to pull Miray out of the dime stores and drugstores, where the payoffs were worst, and sell only in the big department stores, which were supposed to be respectable. Well, let me tell you something: The big stores may have been a
little
more respectable, but there were still payoffs, and I'm talking Wanamaker's and Saks and Best's and Lord & Taylor, I'm not talking dreck. In those days, anyway. The only difference between the fancy stores and the dime stores was that the big stores were too busy to change their displays every half hour! Except for Altman's. I've always trusted Altman's. My family were friends with the Altman family, and they were always respectable people. But Saks! Saks used to be owned by the Gimbel family, who were from out West somewhere, and my husband used to say, “Beware of the Gimbels!” He'd say, “I helped make Frank Woolworth rich, now I'm making the Gimbels rich!” Think of that: if it hadn't been for men like my husband, who would she be, this Barbara Hutton?

Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes, the payoffs. It was worst in the nineteen twenties, and even in the nineteen thirties, right up to just before the war. Today, I don't know about. Ask Mimi. In the nineteen twenties and 'thirties there were even worse things than that. This is a very competitive business, as I guess you know. The competition in this business is fierce, it's cutthroat. There were real strong-arm tactics used to keep a competitor's product off the shelves. They'd use the Teamsters to misdirect a competitor's shipment, or to get it “lost” or hijacked. There'd be kidnap threats, even murder threats. It was no holds barred! This was during Prohibition that all this started, but it went on even afterward. In the nineteen twenties was when cosmetics began to be big business. That was when even Wall Street began to take a serious look at companies like ours. Before that, we were thought of as kind of like the movie business, strictly small-time stuff. But now that even Wall Street was looking us over, it meant the competition was even stiffer. It became like a war between the cosmetics companies.

Then, in 'twenty-nine I think it was, there was a kind of scandal, at least it could have been if it hadn't been covered up. A Revlon—I think it was Revlon, yes, I'm sure it was Revlon—a Revlon shipping van was found in New Jersey with its tires slashed and a bullet hole through the windshield. The driver was gone, they never did find him. But there were bloodstains inside the cab, and in the back, all the shipping crates and cartons had been ripped open and their contents smashed to smithereens. A witness said she'd seen what sounded like one of our Miray cars in the vicinity the night it happened.

Well! As you can imagine, Adolph was fit to be tied when he heard about this! He called Leo on the carpet and wanted to know what he knew about this. Leo just laughed in Adolph's face. Leo admitted he knew that something like that was going to happen. Leo admitted that, behind Adolph's back, he'd been hiring gangsters—The Mob!—to frighten the competition. That made Adolph just about hit the roof, but Leo said, “It's just a part of the price of doing business.” Can you imagine that? Anyway, the witness changed her story, said she could have been mistaken (someone must have threatened her or bought her off), and that scandal went away on us. But you can imagine how knowing that Leo was doing things like that made Adolph even crazier. That was when Adolph began filling the pages of his diaries with lots of entries under the heading “Plan to Get Rid of Leo.” It took him almost ten years to do it, but he did it.

I mean, the under-the-counter payoffs were one thing—everybody did that—but using The Mob, that was too much for Adolph.

Then, I think I mentioned that Leo had this son, this Nate. In nineteen thirty-one, this Nate was about thirty, and Leo began pushing Adolph to give Nate some big job in the company. Well, by then, Adolph didn't want Leo in the company, and he certainly didn't want Nate! Nate was a bum! Meanwhile, Adolph had always planned that our son Henry would take over the company someday—that was Adolph's dream. Our son Henry was born in nineteen sixteen, and so in nineteen thirty-one, Henry was just fifteen, just a little boy, but that was another reason why Adolph didn't want to let Nate into the company, to be there standing in our Henry's way when the time came.

Henry was just fifteen years old when Nate—his own cousin, a grown man—approached him.

Henry was … so young. Young, even, for fifteen. How can I describe my Henry to you? He was innocent, a beautiful child—not like Edwee, not at all. Henry believed in the goodness of things, even then. Sometimes, I think that Henry was too good a person to live out a full life. Of course, that Alice he married was no help to him, no help at all. Any brains, any goodness that are in Mimi came from her father's side, not from that Alice. Even Mimi's looks come from Henry.

Henry was—how to describe him? Henry was my angel on earth. He was my Henny-Penny—that's what I called him. Do you know that story about Henny-Penny? “Run, run, the sky is falling!” I didn't know it, but the sky was beginning to fall on Henry even then. Later, if Alice knew it, she was too stupid to know what to do about it! Henry could have had … such a future! Do you know that story in the Bible about old King David when he hears that his son Absalom has been killed? He goes to the tower over the gate and cries, “O Absalom, my son, my son Absalom. Would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son.” That's how I felt when I heard that my Henny-Penny was dead … like going to a tower … and crying out to God.… Oh, you don't know it, but it's a terrible thing for a mother to outlive her firstborn son … terrible.… Excuse me, I'm sorry.… Do you mind turning off that machine until I … [unintelligible] …

All right. Yes, I'm fine, now. Let's go on. Where was I? Oh, how Nate corrupted Henry, and turned him against his father. Nate approached Henry—Nate, a grown man, his first cousin, and Henry, a child of fifteen—and said to him, “Do you know how your father and my father run that company of theirs? That swell little company that you're supposed to inherit? They hire gangsters to run it, that's how! Gangsters who kill people who get in their way! What do you think of that? They actually kill people!” It seems that Leo had actually boasted to Nate about his gangster connections, and how he used them! Can you imagine that?

Henry—so young, so innocent, so trusting—ran to his father and said, “Is it true, Daddy? Is it true what Cousin Nate says—that you pay to have people killed?” Of course Adolph denied it. How could you not deny a question like that, coming from your own young son? But I know that Henry knew from his father's reaction that his father was lying to him. Children know these things. You can't lie to a child. And I don't think Henry ever trusted his father again. I don't think he ever believed in his father's business again. I don't think Henry ever even trusted
me
again, because I was there when his father tried to deny all these things, and of course I had to deny them too, even though I knew the truth. I had to stand behind my husband.

I honestly think Adolph could have killed Leo then, killed Leo
and
Nate, killed them both, if he could have figured out a way. Sometimes I think he should have—for killing his son's love for him, for robbing him of his innocence, for poisoning a son's mind against his father, and even me who loved him more than the world itself! Because that was what it was like—a poison in the mind of an impressionable young boy. Because Henry never forgot it. Years later, Henry came back at his father and accused him—but I don't need to tell you that all this made my husband more determined than ever to get his brother out of the company—
forever
.

There's a picture of my Henry over there on that little table in the corner. It was taken when he was about thirty. Go take a look at it. See that sad, mistrustful look in his eyes? It was there from that day in nineteen thirty-one onward. But see how handsome he was? Can you see Mimi's face in his? I can, or could. I used to pick up that photograph often, and study that face, and that look, and curse Leo and Nate for doing what they did to him. Of course, I can't see that photograph anymore, but I can still see the face, and the look, in my mind's eye. Now, turn off your machine again because this next I am going to tell you is for off the record.…

“Payoffs?” Mimi smiles. “We're a bit more sophisticated nowadays than we were in my grandfather's day. Today, it's called public relations. I have a whole department devoted to it. A retailer or salesperson would be insulted today if you went up to him and handed him an envelope full of money, the way my grandfather used to do. But we're still very nice to our friends the retailers, as we say. We take them out to lunch and dinner, we have parties for them. We remember them at Christmastime with a little note and a little gift. I make it a point to make regular personal visits to the stores where our products are sold. I visit with the buyers, chat with the salesgirls, tell them what a terrific job they're doing, how great they look, offer them little hints on how to make their jobs easier for them. There are certain special salespeople to whom we pay special attention. See that Rolodex file on my desk? It's full of the names of special salespeople who've done well for us over the years. It's got their names, their home addresses, their spouses' names, their children's names and ages, their birthdays, their glove sizes, everything we can find out about them. On Christmas, these special people get very special gifts from us and a personal note from me. There's Miss Libby from Neiman's in Fort Worth, for instance. Every year for the past fifteen years, Miss Libby personally sells over fifty thousand dollars' worth of our products. Naturally, we're extra nice to the little jewels like Miss Libby. On her fifteenth anniversary with the store, I sent Miss Libby a Cartier pearl choker—pearls, because I'd heard her say that the only jewels she ever wore were pearls. I like to think we're especially good at remembering to add these personal touches.

“And of course we're always giving away free samples of our products. Sampling, as it's called, has always been a big part of this business. Every day, we give away cartons and cartons of free samples to our friends and would-be friends. Everybody loves to get something that's free—I don't care how rich the person is. Even if it's a free bunch of parsley in the supermarket, the shopper will take it whether she needs parsley or not! My grandfather used to say, ‘If it's free, take two.' In fact, it was the whole practice of sampling that made me come up with the free-gift-for-purchase idea. Yes, I was the first manufacturer to do that. For every purchase of a Miray product, the customer gets one—or two or three or four—free samples of some of our other products. It's an incentive for the purchaser, and also for the salesperson because it gives her an extra selling tool. We'll be doing that with the new fragrance: every woman who buys a bottle of the perfume will get a free sample of the men's cologne for her husband, lover, or whatever. Vice versa for the men who buy the cologne.

“Of course when I first took over the company in 'sixty-two, after my father's … accident … there was no money anywhere. The creditors were hounding us, and there was even talk of Chapter Eleven. During his few years as head of the company, my father had made what, in retrospect, turned out to be some unwise business decisions. It was up to me to try to reposition our products in the marketplace, to reposition the whole Miray name. There was no money for special gifts or dinners for buyers or pearl chokers for salesladies. There was not even enough money to pay the salaries for a sales force. I had to go out to the stores myself, trying to sweet-talk the buyers into stocking us. I walked up and down the aisles myself, with my little tray of free samples, passing them out. I even became an unpaid saleslady, standing at a counter, helping customers apply their makeup, suggesting lipstick and eye shadow shades, giving little beauty tips on this and that, hoping they'd end up buying something.