Shades of Fortune (56 page)

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.

“Do you? What makes you think that?” He shook his head slowly back and forth. “No,” he said. “I think not. You see, Miss Myerson, your enterprise is saddled with several factors which mitigate against its chances for success. To begin with, by your own admission, your capital structure, your capital foundation, is weak.”

“That's why I'm here to see you—to help me build a strong capital base.”

He held up his hand. “Please let me finish,” he said. “There are at least three other factors, three other mitigating factors. Let me name them for you. One, you are young. Two, you are inexperienced. And three, you are a woman. All three factors combine to indicate to me that you are ill-equipped to compete in the dog-eat-dog world of the American cosmetics industry.”

“Then your answer is no,” she said.

His bald head nodded in the lamplight. “My answer,” he said, “is no.”

“Well, then,” she said, reaching for the briefcase and purse beside her feet, “there's no point in my taking up any more of your time. I'm disappointed, of course, and I think you're making a mistake, but I'm not going to argue with you. But I did bring one thing with me that I'd like you to have, anyway.” She placed her briefcase on her lap, snapped it open, and withdrew a manila envelope. “I thought you might like to have this.”

Lazarus Goldman accepted the envelope, opened it, and slid its contents out onto the desk in front of him. For a long moment, he stared at the sepia photograph. Then he whispered, “My God … Fannie.
Fannie
. Where did you get this?”

“Your late wife was a bridesmaid in my grandmother's wedding,” she said. “In nineteen fifteen.”

“Nineteen fifteen … the year I met her,” he said, and in the lamplight, she thought she saw tears glistening in his eyes. “My God, she was beautiful.”

“Yes,” she said. “Very beautiful. That's why I thought you might like to have the photograph. She was an extraordinarily beautiful young woman. And I feel I can speak with some authority about beautiful women, because that's the business I'm in, Mr. Goldman—beauty.” She sat back in her chair again.

From the
Wall Street Journal
, August 24, 1962:

PUBLIC OFFERING OF MIRAY STOCK IS ANNOUNCED

The Miray Corporation, a family-held company since 1912, will make its first public offering of stock next month, it was announced today. The offering is to be underwritten by Goldman, Sachs & Co.

Miray, long a respected name in the cosmetics business, manufactures a long line of hair, nail-care, and other beauty products. In recent years, however, sales have turned sluggish. This has been attributed to the marketing philosophy of the company's late president, Henry Myerson, who died earlier this year, who tried to reposition Miray in the mass market. Previously, Miray products had been sold only in select specialty stores. Mr. Myerson's attempt, a cause of some controversy in the industry at the time it was announced, has been deemed a failure.

Miray, with plant and inventory assets estimated in excess of $30,000,000, has also found itself saddled with a debt that industry leaders consider “worrisome.” This has led, within the last two years, to lay-offs and firings within the company. That the company has not yet managed to struggle out from under this debt has been laid to Henry Myerson's “lackluster” leadership.

But the company's fortunes may be headed for an upturn under the stewardship of its new president, Mireille (“Mimi”) Myerson, 24, who assumed the presidency following her father's death in April. Miss Myerson is described as a “dynamo,” a “whiz kid,” and “a real get-up-and-go-girl.” Miss Myerson has announced her determination to reestablish Miray's products in an upscale market, under the new product banner “Mireille,” and she is already responsible for several merchandising innovations that seem to be heading her toward her goal. Her ascendancy, and considerable marketing savvy, have caused the financial community to look at Miray with new interest and respect. Miss Myerson is the granddaughter of Adolph Myerson, the company's late founder.

No price has yet been announced for the new Miray offering, but it is expected to reach the market at approximately $25 a share.…

“You did it!” he cried. “By golly, you did it!” And he flung the newspaper into the air, pulled her from the chair she sat in, and began dancing her around their living room, crying, “You did it! You did it!”

“
We
did it,” she said. “We did it together! I couldn't have done it if you hadn't told me what you did about Lazarus Goldman.”

“But
you
charmed the old fart!”

“Now, please,” she said, and I could imagine her laughing her throaty laugh when she told me this story. “Mr. Lazarus is
not
an old fart. He's a fine gentleman of the old school. And, inside, an old softie.”

“Let's celebrate! Let's go out for dinner and dancing. Let's go to the Rainbow Room!”

“Not the Rainbow Room,” she said quickly. “Too … touristy.”

“Wherever you say,” he said. “This is your night!”

That was the night when they decided that Mimi's new line of scented toiletries for men—the after-shave, the talc, the shampoo and conditioner, the soap—could only, appropriately, be called Persuasion … by Mireille.

From Philip Dougherty's column, September 10, 1962:

COLOR TV DRAWS NEW ADVERTISING CATEGORIES

With color television in more American homes than ever before, with constantly improving quality of color transmission and reception, and with no end in sight, advertising categories that have long shunned TV are now turning to color TV with enthusiasm. Two of these categories are the food and cosmetics industries.

“We avoided television because, in black and white, all food looked blah,” says George Kalisher, spokesman for General Foods. “But with improved color transmission, food can be made to look appetizing, with very little doctoring.” Similarly, the cosmetics industry until recently felt more comfortable in the glossy pages of the print media, where, it was felt, color accuracy was most important. But improved TV color quality is changing all that. Revlon, for instance, has become the new sponsor of
Catch Me If You Can
, the popular quiz show, and NBC-TV has hired quiz ace Prince Fritzi von Maulsen as a special $5O,000-a-year quiz consultant. Von Maulsen will also appear regularly as a contestant on
Catch Me If You Can
. Also in the forefront of new cosmetics advertisers, with its brand-new line of “Mireille” products, including toiletries for men, is the Miray Corporation. Its fall schedule of TV commercials will air in 212 separate markets nationwide.…

From
Mother Hall's Chickens
, the Alumnae Magazine of Miss Hall's School for Girls, Fall/Winter issue, 1962:

CLASS NOTES '56

by

Barbara Badminton Bakely, Class Secretary

Well, who'd a thunk it! Does anybody remember li'l ole Mimi Myerson? I mean, does
anybody???
Well, she was that shy little wallflower who used to lean on her mop in Main, and never had a date, much less a debut, dahlings. Well, that li'l gal we all thought was
least
likely to succeed is now all over the N'Yawk papers as the hot new lady exec!!!! She's, yup, prexy of the Miray Corp., hard as it may seem to believe, and now when yer readin' 'bout Mireille (“Mimi”) Myerson in the tabs and the gabs, just pinch yourself and say, yep, that's our own little Me-Me Mouseburger. Will wondahs nevah cease???? Nevah, dahlings, nevah!!!!

Classmately,

B.B.B.

27

It would be pretty to suppose that it had happened quite that fast, or that it had all been quite that easy. In those days, following Adolph Myerson's death, three giants had emerged in the cosmetics industry. These were Elizabeth Arden, Helena Rubinstein, and Charles Revson. It was my privilege (if privilege is the right word) to have known all three of these individuals. In temperament and demeanor, the three could not have been less alike. Miss Arden, as she was always called, was an ageless, creamy-skinned beauty who affected the manners and speech of a lady born to ancient wealth, though everything about her marbled persona was of her own manufacture.

Born in the Canadian outback as Florence Graham, she had concocted her name from two of her favorite works of fiction,
Elizabeth and Her German Garden
and
Enoch Arden
. After failing to complete a nurse's training course, she had borrowed $6,000 from a brother (a loan that, rumor had it, was never actually repaid) and come to New York to open a beauty salon. “If I couldn't make people healthy, I would at least make them beautiful,” she once said. She had entered the world of American high society through the sport of kings, with her Blue Grass Stable and her racehorses, which she insisted be rubbed down daily with her Ardena skin cream. She survived, as did her horses, on a peculiar diet of wheat germ, honey, blackstrap molasses, and vinegar. Bowlsful of these comestibles were ceremoniously presented to her in silver vessels at the best tables of such bygone restaurants as The Colony and Le Pavilion. For all her patrician bearing and
Social Register
accent, she was known to turn into a screeching harridan at the sight of red ink in her daily sales figures.

Helena Rubinstein, who was always called “Madame,” was an altogether different sort. Short, plump, and heavily Polish-accented, she had somehow managed to make her way out of the Krakow ghetto at some indeterminate point in the nineteenth century and come, by way of Australia, Paris, and London, to New York shortly before World War I as an enormously rich woman. Because she distrusted banks, the fat black pocketbook she always carried was always stuffed with wads of currency, the separate denominations of bills rolled together and secured with rubber bands. When the board of the co-op at 625 Park Avenue, where she wanted to buy the triplex penthouse, demurred because it did not wish to have a Jewish tenant, Madame Rubinstein simply bought the entire building, paying cash for it. At her dinner parties, she fretted that her guests did not eat enough. Crying “Eat, eat,” she would scrape food from her own plate onto my own. She would also, I happened to notice, use the corner of her Porthault tablecloth to blow her nose.

Then there was Mr. Revson.

One afternoon in the early spring of 1963, the telephone rang in Mimi's office. And, because she answered her own calls then, she reached for the receiver and picked it up. “Mimi?” a man's hoarse voice said. “It's Charlie.”

“Charlie?”

“Charlie Revson.”

“Oh, yes, Mr. Revson,” Mimi said.

“It's Charlie,” he barked. “All my friends call me Charlie. Call me Charlie. Listen, sweetheart, you and I have got a problem. We need to talk.”

“Certainly,” Mimi said.

“First of all, sweetheart, you got to realize that this company of mine is my entire life, and my entire life is this company. I built this company from scratch, starting with three hundred bucks and working out of a garage in Boston. Everything I've done for Revlon I've done myself. Understand? I didn't get my company handed to me on a silver platter by my old man.”

“Well, as a matter of fact, neither did I,” Mimi said.

“Yeah. Well, like I said, sweetheart, I've worked hard for my own little piece of the action in this game, and now it looks like you're trying to muscle in on my turf. And that ain't okay. Understand?”

“Not exactly,” Mimi said, although she was fairly sure she did.

“I'm talking territory, toots. Saks is Revlon territory these days, toots. So is Bloomingdale's. So is Bendel, and so is Magnin's. I fought hard to get that territory, toots, and I'm going to fight hard to keep it. Understand? That territory is
mine
.”

“Well, we both work in a free enterprise system,” Mimi began.

“Shit. Don't give me no free enterprise shit. Ever hear that it's the early bird that gets the worm? Well, in this case, I'm the early bird, and Saks and Bloomie's and Bendel's and Magnin's is all my worms, understand? I was there first, sweetheart. I staked my claim with those outlets before you was even born. Shit, I staked that territory before your old man could even get a hard-on.”

“I'm sorry, Mr. Revson, but—”