Good was not good enough.…I know now that obsession is the word for my zeal. I was obsessed with clear glowing skin, shining eyes, beautiful mouths.
—Estée Lauder, Estée: A Success Story (1985)
Without 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.”
Rushed into print in an attempt to beat its competitor to press, each Lauder life turned out to be unsatisfying and incomplete. In her book, which came out in mid-October 1985, just two weeks before Israel’s, Lauder, assisted by an uncredited ghost writer, covered just the basic facts—she finally acknowledged, for example, that she had Jewish roots. Like the other obsessives profiled in this book (with the notable exception of Ted Williams, who, with the help of a co-author, produced a moving bestseller about his personal struggles dating back to his boyhood), Lauder had little capacity for self-reflection; she provided just a two-dimensional picture of her emotional life. Like Jefferson, whose autobiography abruptly stopped in 1790 when he was in his late forties, she got bored with talking about herself halfway into her book; from that point on, the narrative turned to business tips. In contrast, while Israel did some valuable digging into her subject’s family background and key relationships, Estée Lauder: Beyond the Magic, An Unauthorized Biography suffered from its prosecutorial tone. Attacking Lauder as a heartless social climber, Israel failed to capture her subject’s spark and ingenuity. Israel admitted as much to me when she called her effort “a bad book.” In both the marketplace and the book pages, neither did well. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Marylin Bender characterized Lauder’s prose as “gush cranked out by her publicity department” and Israel’s style as “incoherent.”
And in a curious twist, subsequent events in Israel’s own life have cast a shadow on her factual findings, which by and large come across as plausible. “I guess there is a certain irony,” Israel admitted to me, “in my questioning Estée’s veracity.” After her Lauder biography tanked, Israel descended into alcoholism and poverty; and in the early 1990s, in a desperate attempt to stay afloat, she turned to forging letters of such literary notables as Dorothy Parker and Noël Coward. This descent into criminality, for which she was convicted but not sent to prison—the penalty was five years of probation and six months’ house arrest—became the subject of Israel’s controversial 2008 memoir, Can You Ever Forgive Me?
Besides dispelling a few common falsehoods such as the foreign birth—this Queen of Beauty was actually born to middle-class European immigrants in Queens, New York—the two biographies added little to the public’s understanding of Lauder. Israel’s publisher, Macmillan, promised several “bombshells,” nearly all of which the cosmetics tycoon acknowledged in one form or another so as to take away Israel’s thunder. (In the months preceding the launch, the rival publishers, Macmillan and Random House, kept close tabs on one another.) But by the mid-1980s, the two juiciest bits of new info—Lauder’s Jewishness and her divorce from Joseph in 1939, which was followed by remarriage in 1942—were hardly tantalizing enough to set many tongues wagging.
In retrospect, what is most revealing about Lauder’s book is what she left out. On the subject of her Jewishness, despite her promise “to be candid,” she noted only that her mother was half-Jewish; she said nothing about her father’s religion. Noting that her maternal grandmother was a French Catholic, she alluded to her “ecumenical approach to religion.” But her family was actually Jewish on both sides. And she was raised as an observant Jew, as were both of her sons. While Leonard and Ronald have long been open about their religious heritage—1987 saw the birth of the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation, which assists European communities ravaged by the Holocaust—only after their mother’s death in 2004 did they begin to embrace her Jewish identity. As Ann Friedman, director of the New York Landmarks Conservancy’s Sacred Sites Program, informed me, Leonard Lauder’s generous donations have been instrumental in restoring the Congregation Tifereth Israel—the synagogue is the oldest building in Queens—where Estée Lauder worshipped as a child a century ago. Inside are bronze plaques with the names of both her parents. (This Queens landmark also has ties to another prominent self-made woman. In 1979 and 1980, Madonna lived in the building across the street that once served as the temple’s Yeshiva.)
The careful fudging about her religious background in the autobiography underlines how much Lauder was a creature of control. Like Kinsey and Lindbergh, she sought to shape her public image, down to the smallest details. As she saw it, the story of her life was essentially the story of her brand; hence, the stakes were far from trivial. “She sold herself as a brand,” Leonard Lauder told me. “The ads say, ‘Estée Lauder says.’ Everything depended on her authority.” Her company peddled not just beauty products but a lavish lifestyle; and in post–World War II America, Lauder concluded, not entirely unreasonably, that coming out as a Jewish girl from Queens would reduce her cachet. By the mid-1980s, Lauder also had another compelling reason for describing herself as ecumenical rather than Jewish—the marketplace in the tense Middle East. At the time, the Arab League boycotted many companies that traded with Israel, and Lauder was forced to do business with one side or the other. And in contrast to her Jewish-owned competitors such as Revlon, she chose the Arabs, who were big fans of her pungent fragrances, over the Jews. Like Jefferson, she enjoyed sweating the small stuff. “God is in the details,” she would often say (though the nonreader had no idea that she was recycling a phrase often attributed to novelist Gustave Flaubert or architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe). In the end, she produced a book that was as carefully packaged as any of the lipsticks in her company’s vaunted Christmas lines.
In Lauder, this desire for control was combined with a fiercely competitive nature. “She taught me to be the best at whatever you do, even if that’s selling peanuts. Second best wasn’t good enough for her,” stated her son Ronald in a phone interview. Agnes Ash, the now nearly ninety-year-old former editor of the Palm Beach Daily News, who was a good friend for half a century, recalled going to a polo match with her in the 1980s to watch Prince Charles: “The conversation came around to the possibility of her sponsoring a polo team. Estée then suddenly stated out, ‘But what if they didn’t win! My products have to be associated with a winner.’”
As with other obsessives, Lauder often sought to impose her will on others. “My grandmother was a very determined woman,” William Lauder, Leonard’s son, now in his early fifties, who became the company’s CEO in 2004, noted in an interview in his office. “There were two ways to do things with her—you could do it her way, or you could compromise and do it her way,” added her grandson, who has served as executive chairman since stepping down from the top job in 2009. “My grandfather [Joseph Lauder] used to say, ‘Here we go again’ before giving in.” However, in the one-on-one of the sales arena, she knew just how far to push; and her gentle but firm persistence was precisely what made her a supersaleswoman. “Customers flocked to her because of the force of her personality. She loved people,” Leonard Lauder told me. While the first statement is undoubtedly true, the second is debatable. Her charm with customers, like Kinsey’s compassion with interviewees, did not come naturally. It was something that she turned on to achieve her objective. Away from the department store counter, she often came across as both intimidating and detached. In a recent phone interview, a retired executive who provided consulting services to her company from the 1960s to the 1980s and who did not wish to be identified, stated, “I learned never to argue with Mrs. Lauder. I had no choice but to acquiesce.” In the autobiography, she stuck in an analogous throwaway comment: “I must admit that I’m not terribly democratic in my business, and neither is my son, Leonard.”
In contrast to his mother, who never went beyond high school, the Ivy League–educated Leonard is a careful and systematic thinker. However, he shares her quirky and demanding temperament. Now eighty and one of America’s fifty wealthiest men—he’s worth more than $7 billion, according to Forbes—Leonard has always been fidgety. As a middle-aged man, when stuck in traffic on the highway, he used to head for the nearest exit and drive in the other direction so that he could keep moving. As Allan Mottus, a beauty industry consultant, told the New York Times in 1987, just as Leonard was coming out from under his mother’s shadow, “he’s secretive, confidential to the point of obsession. Leonard’s a very studied person.…He is acting a role.” Leonard has also sought tight control over media coverage. “He used to ask to review my stories before publication, but I had to tell him that we didn’t do that at the New York Times,” Marylin Bender told me.
In contacting family members and former business associates for this chapter, I repeatedly came up against a kind of omertà. Many would refuse to talk, and those who did sometimes insisted on anonymity; even then, on a couple of occasions, I heard, “Leonard is going to kill me for saying this.” Given the family penchant for privacy and control, the recent sex scandal involving his son William struck Bender as “highly un-Lauder-like.” (During his five-year stint as CEO, as the New York Post revealed in 2007, William carried on an extra-marital affair with Manhattan socialite Taylor Stein, which resulted in “a love child.”) While Leonard built the company up by creating a well-oiled organization and focusing on the numbers—say, achieving sales goals—he was careful to preserve, as he told Harvard Business School professor Nancy Koehn in the late 1990s, “the intuitive, gutsy feel of Mrs. Estée Lauder.” So too have Leonard’s successors, including the Italian-born Fabrizio Freda, who took over as CEO in 2009.
And Estée Lauder’s sensibility, which continues to guide the company, was shaped in her Jewish childhood in Queens, which she spent her whole adult life running away from.
In her early days, America’s preeminent nose was forced to breathe in some horrific scents. Corona, Queens, where Josephine Esther Mentzer was born on July 1, 1908, was literally a dump. The Brooklyn Ash Company used the mostly working-class Italian neighborhood—the total number of Jewish residents, who had first begun settling in the still-sylvan community around 1900, then came to only 150—as the site to spill the waste collected on its railroad cars. In addition to the thick clouds of foul-smelling smoke that emanated from the smoldering refuse, the future beauty tycoon also had to inhale the stench from the manure-filled barges left at the nearby docks. “In her youth, because of all the garbage,” Queens historian Vincent Tomeo said in a recent phone interview, “Corona was known as ‘the dumps.’ It also had a serious rodent problem.” WAR DECLARED UPON RATS, ran the headline of a New York Times story, published on November 4, 1920, which discussed the plan of New York health commissioner R. S. Copeland to exterminate the rats that infested both Corona’s meadow dumps and its residential neighborhood. “Commissioner Copeland,” the paper reported, “in a communication to the Corona Civic Aid Society said inspectors of his department had found conditions to be as bad as described.” Corona would not get a serious makeover until the late 1930s, when it was selected as the venue for the World’s Fair.
“Terrible place” was the assessment rendered by Tom Buchanan, the old-monied, Yale-educated villain of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby. Buchanan’s depressed proletarian mistress hails from Corona, which the novelist described as a “valley of ashes…bounded on one side by a small foul river.” One of the early titles of the Fitzgerald classic was “Among the Ash Heaps and the Millionaires.” To cross over to the ranks of the millionaires, Esther (or Estelle, as she was then also called—no one ever referred to her as Josephine) would completely erase her past, just like the self-made financier Jay Gatsby, who, as Fitzgerald wrote, “sprang from his Platonic conception of himself.”
Her mother, Rose Schotz, was a Hungarian Jew who had immigrated to America, accompanied by her five children, in 1898. In New York City, the twenty-nine-year-old Rose was reunited with her Hungarian husband, Abraham Rosenthal. But a few years later, Rosenthal was gone.
A struggling single mother with little education—as census records reveal, she could neither read nor write—and in a strange land, Rose Schotz was beside herself with grief. As Rose later said little about what happened other than to label this blow a “burden,” Lauder was never sure whether her mother’s first husband died or simply abandoned the family; the latter scenario was more likely, as she would acknowledge in her memoir.
This loss compounded the other major events that Rose had endured back in Hungary. When she was a little girl, her mother dropped dead after eating a spider hidden in a cup of water drawn from a well. Rose was then reared by a nasty stepmother. To escape her unhappy family predicament, she had run off with Rosenthal, an older cousin, at the age of fifteen.
But before Rose could give in to despair, she was rescued by a knight in shining armor—though he did not joust, he was quite the able equestrian—another Jewish immigrant from Hungary, Max Mentzer (the family name was derived from the German city of Mainz). With her second husband, Rose had two more children, Grace (called Renée) and Esther. Mentzer first worked as a tailor and did other odd jobs. The 1920 census identified him as a driver for a bakery. In the early 1920s, he opened up a hardware store at 107th Street and Corona Avenue, above which the family lived. His new business venture did well, and by 1930, as census records show, the family’s real estate was worth a hefty $50,000 ($650,000 today). As his fortunes improved, Mentzer also built a stable next to the house. In the late 1930s—after Lauder had gotten married—Mentzer would move into the largely Jewish Washington Heights section of Manhattan and become the director of the Beth El Cemetery in Paramus, New Jersey; at his new place of employment, he could show off his equestrian skills by taking mourners (and family members) on horseback rides. The entire family, including Lauder, is buried there.
Though Lauder finally did cough up the key facts about her childhood in her autobiography, she still spun several hard-to-believe yarns; a few revolved around the supposedly aristocratic backgrounds of her parents. She claimed that the Austrian emperor Franz Joseph had personally selected Mentzer as the man whom one of his nieces should marry—an offer he allegedly declined because the bride-to-be weighed three hundred pounds. Lauder also insisted that her mother went to spas in Carlsbad and Baden-Baden for beauty treatment—though the family had some means by the early 1930s, it’s highly unlikely that she or her husband ever traveled back to Europe. (For Jews of that generation, Germany was not exactly a favorite tourist destination.) And while Lauder stated that her mother spoke “a very broken English, with a predominantly German accent,” that phrase is misleading. Yiddish was the mother tongue of both her parents, as noted on the 1920 census, and was the language spoken at home. Years later, Lauder could still hold her own in Yiddish, though she never let the press know.
While the tall, handsome, and affable Mentzer was the answer to Rose’s prayers, one gnawing problem remained: her traumatic anxiety. She was terrified of being abandoned by Max just as she had been by her first husband (and by her mother, who had suddenly died on her). And her fear that her dashing husband might run off with another woman was magnified by the difference in their ages—he was a full decade younger.
In an effort to hold on to her man, Rose engaged in an elaborate beauty ritual as soon as he left the house in the morning. “My mother began brushing her hair,” Lauder later wrote, “even before she opened her eyes.” Rose was obsessed with staying attractive and young looking.
And just as the young Henry Heinz became “his mother’s little helper,” Esther became her mother’s little personal beauty assistant. “My very first memory,” Lauder later wrote, “is of my mother’s scent, her aura of freshness, the perfume of her presence.…Her hair didn’t escape my attention, either. As soon as I was old enough to hold a brush, I’d give her no peace.” A script was thus implanted into little Esther’s brain, one which Estée Lauder would replay time and time again. She would always equate her own well-being with her ability to help the women in her midst look their best.
The lifelong addiction to making up women was already under way in early childhood. “Esty, you’ve already brushed my hair three times today,” her mother would complain. Likewise, her irked father would oft repeat, “Stop fiddling with other people’s faces.” Once she started going to school, the first thing Esther would do when she got home was pat the face of her older sister, Renée, with her mother’s skin cream.
“But this is what I liked to do—touch other people’s faces, no matter who they were,” Lauder wrote in her autobiography, “touch them and make them pretty. Before I’m finished, I’ll set, I’m certain, the world’s record for face touching.” This feat she would accomplish, just as Kinsey would set records for collecting both galls and sex histories.
For Lauder, the obsession with glowing skin and shining eyes was forever tied to her own deepest needs for love and connection. If she could only keep her mother beautiful, little Esty must have thought, she could keep her family together and thus guarantee herself the love of both her parents. “My mother was so beautiful that a man fifteen years younger married her,” she told the New York Times in 1967, stretching the truth by five years. “Now my purpose is to keep women looking younger and younger.” This pursuit was not just what Lauder ended up doing for a living; it became her reason for living. And her obsession could translate into a phenomenal living because her mother’s predicament was universal; while Rose Mentzer’s fear of abandonment was extreme, many women share her dread of aging and losing their looks. Like Heinz, who targeted his products to stressed-out mothers eager to put fresh food on the table, Lauder could also tap into a huge market.
While the adult Lauder would describe herself as the “coddled baby of the family,” the evidence suggests otherwise. Like Lindbergh, she came from a topsy-turvy family where the traditional child and parent roles were reversed. As a child, she kept herself busy tending to the needs of her anxious parents, particularly her mother. And like other obsessives who received little nurturing, she took on various adult responsibilities at an early age. Just like Melvil Dewey, who compiled an inventory of the items in his father’s general store, as a teenager Esther organized the wares in her father’s hardware store. Mothering her own parents would be a lifelong assignment. In the 1950s, when the forty-something executive was zipping across the country on sales trips, she would feel compelled to call Max and Rose nearly every night to allay their anxiety about her stressful existence.
And the little girl eager to please her parents would evolve into a merchant eager to please patrons. “Let’s listen to our customer,” she would state in a lecture to fashion students toward the end of her life. “She’s trying to tell us something—and the word she is trying to tell us is service.”
In her autobiography, Lauder summed up her childhood as nearly idyllic. In her cheery rendering, the only blot was “the specter of an infantile paralysis epidemic [that] loomed over New York.” Due to this public health catastrophe, the anxious Rose fled with her two preteens to the home of Sarah Gottlieb—her younger sister—in Milwaukee for several months. Lauder did not mention the date of the move, but it was probably in or around 1916; from June to November that year, the death toll in New York City from polio amounted to a staggering 2,407 persons, 98 percent of whom were children under sixteen. Of the five boroughs, Queens was hardest hit; its death rate was .90 per 1,000 residents, more than twice the average for the city as a whole and three times more than that of Manhattan. New York’s Department of Health attributed the epidemic to “insects migrating by themselves or on the body of some animal host like a rat”—a widely circulated conclusion that must have left Esther feeling even more ashamed about her borough of origin. Like Kinsey, so too was this neatnik and order freak created at least in part from early exposure to too much dirt and to too many rats.
But Lauder would never acknowledge any of this angst. All she mentioned about the epidemic was that after the family’s return from Milwaukee, Renée contracted polio and had to wear a brace until she turned fifteen. “When trouble struck,” she wrote, “my sister, not I, absorbed the blow.” In her autobiography, she also said nothing else about Milwaukee except for that quick allusion to her stay there when she was around ten. But she would actually go back to live with her relatives a decade later and work as “a little clean-up girl” in beauty shops. In interviews in the 1960s and 1970s, Lauder would occasionally reference Milwaukee sojourns, but she would embellish her rather modest living conditions with her aunt Sarah. “In Milwaukee,” she told the New York Times in 1967, “a woman used to come to our house every day just to brush my mother’s hair.”
As a girl, her role models were not her parents, but the Leppel sisters—Fanny and Frieda. Eleven years older than Esther, Fanny was married to her half brother Isidor; Frieda was Fanny’s older sister and was married to another Isidore. Together with their husbands, the two sisters transformed their father’s dry-goods store—originally called Leppel’s, it was renamed Pflaker and Rosenthal—into a department store that became known as “the Macy’s of Corona.” “Pflaker and Rosenthal,” Lauder later wrote, “was my gateway to fancy. It was Dress-up Land for me. I loved to play with the beautiful clothes.” Schmoozing with the Jewish customers in Yiddish and the Italians in Neapolitan, Fanny and Frieda were skilled saleswomen who knew how to move product. “I whetted my appetite for the merry ring of a cash register,” Lauder later observed. “I learned early that being a perfectionist and providing quality was the only way to do business.”
In the Leppel, Rosenthal, and Mentzer families, traditional gender roles were turned inside out. The women often took the initiative; the men, in contrast, tended to be less ambitious and to patrol the kitchen. One of Lauder’s relatives, who did not wish to be identified, told me: “Ours was a matriarchal family. Fanny and Frieda ran the store.” Now in his late sixties, this family member recalled attending a Passover Seder with Estée Lauder and her parents in the 1950s: “Her father, Max, made the best matzah balls. They were tight and firm like cannonballs. They sank right to the bottom. Fantastic.”
In contrast to her father, Esther did not like to cook. “One day, in the mid-1960s, while I was walking along Worth Avenue in Palm Beach, Lauder drove up to me in her pale blue Cadillac and invited me over to her English-style mansion for ‘some tea and Sara Lee.’ I was stunned,” Marylin Bender told me. Lauder’s lack of a food sense has been confirmed by numerous other sources. As her granddaughter Aerin recalled, “When we used to visit her in Florida, she would insist on hot lunches. She would prepare for us her favorite foods—spaghetti and meatballs and hot dogs, which she called frankfurters.” In her house in southern France, her American maid would serve caviar on Ritz crackers.
As an adolescent, Esther ventured into the kitchen not to work on matzah balls with her father but to assist her uncle John—her mother’s younger brother—as he produced his skin cream over the gas stove. During World War I, John Schotz, a chemist who may have had a Ph.D., was visiting from Hungary, and he decided to stay in America. “I loved his creams, loved his potions,” Lauder later wrote. She now had a new excuse to go on face-touching binges. In high school, Esther didn’t have “a single friend who wasn’t slathered in our creams,” as the beauty tycoon later put it. “If someone had a slight redness just under her nose…she’d come to visit.”
In the mid-1920s, at about the same time Esther was finishing Newtown High School in Corona, Schotz set up a laboratory on West Forty-Second Street in Manhattan, where he manufactured several beauty products such as a Six-in-One Cold Cream. While Schotz was a clever inventor, he had no idea how to sell anything. But Esther would figure that one out. Renamed “Super-Rich All Purpose Crème,” Schotz’s signature concoction would later emerge as the bedrock of Lauder’s own burgeoning beauty business. “All [her products,]” the New York Times would report in 1959, “are based on formulas that Mrs. Lauder’s uncle, a dermatologist, turned over to her.” (A decade later, she would invent a few more analogous relatives, telling the Boston Globe that her beauty empire was launched with a face pack devised by her “four Viennese doctor uncles.”) According to Schotz’s nephew, Alan Carlan, the chemist did recall giving her the formulas. However, Carlan was not sure if Schotz, who died penniless, ever received a share of the profits.
In the late 1920s, while vacationing in the family’s tiny bungalow in Mohegan Lake in New York’s Westchester County, Esther, then nearly twenty, met her first beau, Joseph Lauter, a man six years older, whose parents were also Jews from Eastern Europe. After studying accounting and shorthand at New York’s High School of Commerce, Joe launched a series of small businesses that sold everything from buttons to textiles; none would do particularly well. (She would later also remove the blemishes from his résumé, telling the Boston Globe that Joe was “a Wall Street financial consultant” when she first met him.) But he was cordial and kind, and that was what won her heart. “All at once I felt noticed, cherished, grown-up, amused, amusing, happy,” she later wrote. Everyone seemed to feel comfortable around Joe. “He was very approachable and easy to talk to,” a relative told me. As the years went on, his unflappable demeanor may have been aided by alcohol, as Lauder herself appeared to acknowledge. In her autobiography, she noted that Joe had “a royal constitution for holding down four or five Scotches without visible effect.”
After a three-year courtship, they were married on January 15, 1930, at the Royal Palms Ballroom on 135th Street and Broadway in West Harlem, then a Jewish neighborhood. While Lauder would later claim that her wedding picture appeared in the rotogravure section of the New York Times, the couple was not yet that socially prominent. That month, the Times did mention a “Mr. and Mrs. J. H. Lauter,” among the recent arrivals at the Bermudiana Hotel, in Bermuda, where they spent their honeymoon. But the couple initially lacked the funds to move into an abode of their own. The 1930 census, taken a few months later, listed them as living in Corona along with her parents as well as with her sister and her husband, Herman Shapiro.
In March 1933, a couple of years after the couple had made the move to their own modest apartment on the West Side of Manhattan, Leonard Allan Lauter was born. The woman who had not been the beneficiary of much mother love dreaded the prospect of being cooped up alone at home with her son. Like the male icons profiled in this book, her identity would come primarily from pursuing her obsessions and compulsions rather than from nurturing others. “It was not enough,” she later wrote, “for me to stay home and play Mommy.” She preferred “mothering my zeal for experimenting with my uncle’s creams,” which she continued to cook up in her kitchen. Lauder also began performing in small parts at the Cherry Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village. “She was not much of a success as an actress,” her grandson William Lauder stated. “But she took something from that experience. She learned how to tell stories in the retail environment.” For Lauder, teaching women about how to take care of their skin would always have a dramatic element. “Pure theater—in the end, that’s what it was, this rendering of beauty,” she would later write.
She got her first chance a few years later. As a young mother, she enjoyed getting her hair done once a month at the House of Ash Blondes, a beauty salon on the Upper West Side run by Florence Morris. One day, in response to a question from Mrs. Morris about how she kept her skin so lovely, Lauder promised to bring in her beauty products. A few weeks later, the excited customer could not wait until her next scheduled visit. She returned to the House of Ash Blondes with four of her uncle’s concoctions—the cream, a cleansing oil, skin lotion, and face powder—and applied a few dabs from each one directly onto Mrs. Morris’s face. An impressed Mrs. Morris offered her a small counter at the new salon that she was opening on East Sixtieth Street. “This was my first chance at a real business,” Lauder later wrote. “I would pay her rent; whatever I sold would be mine to keep. No partners (I never did have partners).” Like the Lone Eagle, Lauder would be characterologically incapable of flying with a copilot and would make her mark without one. When her company was formed a decade later, she and her husband agreed to “be equal partners in every sense of the word.” But her true feelings are more likely contained in that parenthetical aside. As a good obsessive, equality was anathema to her, and she would wield considerable control over her future partners—Joe and Leonard.
And she would put her new name, Estée Lauder, on her jars, which were at first black and white. (Several years later, after doing some snooping around in the homes of her rich friends and clients to determine “what color would look wonderful in any bathroom,” she would switch to pale turquoise, aka “Estée Lauder blue.”) This perfectionist who would later put considerable energy into coming up with le mot juste to describe her products—think of Youth Dew, which held the promise of rolling back the clock by natural means—first had to name herself. She wanted to sound old-Europey, if not French, and “Esther” had to go. However, she would never acknowledge that her new name was her own creation. In a 1969 interview with the Boston Globe, she stated that a nurse at the hospital where she was born was responsible for “the very chic” mistake. In her autobiography, she came up with another story, claiming that an “enterprising” Corona schoolteacher gave her the accent when her father tried to register her in grade school. But there is no indication that this budding entrepreneur was ever known as Estée until “Estée Lauder” first popped up in the Manhattan phone book in 1937. Of her new last name, she asserted that “Joe and I decided that we would return his name to the integrity of the original.” But the decision may not have been mutual, as Joe still went by Lauter for a few more years. And her claim that Lauder was a return to the original spelling “in Austria where Joe’s father was born” is contradicted by the 1930 census, which listed Joe’s father’s place of birth as Russia. Even if the Lauter family name was originally spelled as she said it was, given her tendency to run away from—rather than embrace—her family’s origins, her desire to come across as less Jewish must also be considered a possible reason for this tweak.
As sales of her products took off and Lauder received offers to run concessions at other salons, she needed to clone herself; as she discovered, standing behind a counter, she could touch only about fifty faces a day. “Girl to assist beauty specialist,” ran one of her early ads in the New York Times. “Interesting work with high-class clientele.” The face-touching army, the same one that circulates in department stores around the world today, was born. Just as Kinsey trained his staff when to push forward and when to pull back in interviews, Lauder taught the proper degree of assertiveness with customers. She instructed her assistants not to ask, “May I help you?” but to say, “I have something that would look perfect on you, madam. May I show you how to apply it?” Lauder, who liked to coin phrases as well as names, came up with “Telephone, Telegraph, Tell-A-Woman” to describe her word-of-mouth campaign that was instrumental in stoking sales of her products in those early years.
Her husband suddenly had a new rival—her work. “Business,” Lauder later wrote, “marries you. You sleep with it, eat with it, think about it much of your time. It is…an act of love.” She would often leave Leonard at home with Joe and a maid to go on “working vacations” to swanky hotels, where she could dab faces poolside. Her jaunts in those days were limited mostly to Gatsby country on Long Island. In an effort to fit in, she would dress to the nines. “I knew,” she later mused, “I had to look my best to sell my best.” Dressing for success was to become an article of faith. (Decades later, as Cathie Black, the former head of the Hearst Magazines, noted in her memoir, Lauder would approach employees at her annual Christmas party and yank the back collar of their dresses to examine the label.) She also rarely went out hatless, explaining, “Try to walk in a hat, it makes you look like someone.” Like other obsessives, Lauder had a one-track mind. Business was everything. She never developed any hobbies or other interests. By the late 1930s, she began questioning whether she could stay married to Joe, who lacked her ambition. “When he wanted to talk,” she later wrote, “I’d usually be off in another world, thinking, projecting, planning…my mind awhirl.” In April 1939, she got a divorce.
Still only thirty, Lauder moved with the six-year-old Leonard to Miami Beach. Over the next few years, the attractive, flirtatious, and impeccably dressed divorcée would date a series of older, high-powered men, a couple of whom were still married. One beau was the bachelor Charles Moskowitz—a top executive at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, dubbed by some gossip columnists as “Mr. MGM”—who, as she wrote in her autobiography, “showed me a world I’d never even imagined… Hollywood, stardom.” Another was Dr. John Myers of Palm Beach, a British oral surgeon who made a fortune manufacturing flanges. A man with multiple talents—he was a noted actor and painter—Myers also headed a nonprofit that supported the arts. His then twenty-something daughter, the late Jeannette Vitkin, who later went on to head the Myers Foundation, was startled when her father’s new girlfriend gave her face the once-over. “You shouldn’t wear that lipstick,” Lauder could not help but mention. “It’s not right for you.” Lauder was also seen arm-in-arm with Arnold van Ameringen, a Dutch-born head of a big perfume company, who later became the head of International Flavors and Fragrances. Lauder and Ameringen stayed friendly after their break-up, which was caused by his unwillingness to leave his wife. In the early 1950s, Ameringen provided considerable financial support to her growing business; this perfume tycoon may well also have passed on some of the ingredients of Youth Dew.
After a three-year separation from Joe, Lauder no longer wished to play the field. To her credit, she realized that success meant little without stable human connections, and they got remarried. “Look for a sweet person. Forget rich,” as she later advised others, was the principle that guided her. Ronald, born in 1944, was the product of her return to Joe for a second lap around the track. Lauder thus steered clear of the excesses exhibited by other beauty tycoons such as her chief rival in the 1960s and early 1970s, Charles Revson. Known as “the Nail Man,” the founder of Revlon was a fellow obsessive, who also lived for his business, which doubled as his religion. As Andrew Tobias revealed in his juicy biography, Fire and Ice (1976), Revson ran roughshod over everyone, including three ex-wives, one whose name he couldn’t remember, countless short-term lovers, and “hundreds of shell-shocked, verbally assaulted, overworked…executives,” many of whom he wiretapped. That was the road not taken by Lauder. Nobody could stand Revson. In contrast, Lauder could maintain a genial demeanor and was capable of cordial relationships. “She was a family person, and I could relate to her. That was certainly not the case with Revson,” Marylin Bender told me.
Agnes Ash had a similar take. “Estée was no phony. I was fond of her,” stated Ash, who enjoyed their leisurely lunches during her long tenure as editor of the Palm Beach Daily News. “You could just sit and talk about your family and career; she would give wonderful tips about who you should get to know.” Given Ash’s influence in the community, Lauder’s kindness was not unconnected to the promotion of her brand. Lauder also turned into a tipmeister for Mary Randolph Carter, beauty editor of Mademoiselle. “The first time I met Estée Lauder,” Carter wrote in 1976, “I was eight months pregnant, so we talked a lot about babies and mothering. It was a happy meeting and she left me with all kinds of advice and good wishes.” When asked about her relationship with Lauder in a recent phone interview, Carter, now the creative director for Ralph Lauren, said, “She could be a bear, but not with me. You felt taken care of when you went to her office for a new product launch. As soon as she saw my baby bulge, she made sure that I had a glass of water or juice.”
However, while Lauder, unlike Revson, could come across as genuine and concerned, connecting was always something that she had to work at. Easygoing and relaxed with others she was not. In contrast to her two sons, who both idealize her as an all-loving mother, her grandchildren are well aware that her solicitousness could be awkward, if not downright irksome. “I was staying at her cottage in the south of France when I was about twenty,” Leonard’s son William recalled. “There wasn’t much to do and I wanted to go to the beach with my friends. She started asking all kinds of questions about where we were going. Fortunately, my grandfather was there to calm her down.”
Just as Clara Kinsey mothered Alfred, Joe Lauder would mother Estée. But in contrast to the sex researcher, the beauty-tycoon-in-the-making would not take her spouse for granted. Instead she became deeply appreciative. “I knew I needed him,” she would later write, “not only for emotional support but to keep me in line financially.” After the remarriage, the number-savvy Joe officially abandoned his own career and began managing the practical aspects of her business. But while Joe encouraged her to fulfill her dreams, he had his limits. Thirty years later, when President Nixon offered her the ambassadorship to Luxembourg, Joe told her, “If you go, you go alone. I won’t go along to carry your bags.” She got the message and declined.
In 1946, Lauder launched her company with Joe’s savings and a loan from her father. With the war now over, she no longer had to worry about the shortages of such critical supplies as plastic and glass as well as fats and oils. She and Joe set up a small factory in a former restaurant on West Sixty-Fourth Street. She initially sold her wares only at beauty salons and through the mail, but she soon set her sights on the department store where customers shopped using a new tool—the store credit card, which allowed for impulse buying (bank-issued cards such as Visa and MasterCard were not yet available). But discount outfits such as Macy’s or Gimbel’s would not do. She aimed only for the high-end stores, and Saks Fifth Avenue was the top of the line.
Her characteristic persistence would come in handy; the store’s cosmetics buyer, Robert Fiske, was, as she later wrote, inundated by “experimental merchandisers who would sell their souls to sell from Saks.” Lauder kept bugging Fiske every which way. Every Wednesday and Friday afternoon for weeks on end during buying hours, she sat outside his office along with fifty other merchants. She put pressure on him by repeatedly asking her clients to call the store. She also touched the faces of as many women with ties to Saks as she could find; her prey included an assistant buyer whose skin had been scarred in an auto accident, and the daughter of a prominent executive, whose acne crisis had forced her to wear a little veil over her skin. And when that full-court press did not achieve any results, Lauder tried an end run. In 1948, after a speech at a benefit luncheon at the nearby Waldorf-Astoria, she handed out to the audience free $3 lipstick in metal cases—a fancy touch at the time, as the war had led to the widespread use of plastic tubes. “As the luncheon broke up,” Fiske later noted, “there formed a line across Park Avenue and across Fiftieth Street into Saks asking for these lipsticks, one after another. It convinced us that there was a demand for the Lauder product.” Sold, he placed his first order for $800 worth of merchandise. “Breaking that first, mammoth barrier,” Lauder later recalled, “was perhaps the single most exciting moment I have ever known.” Her first order sold out in two days. By 1950, she was also in Manhattan’s Bonwit Teller and Lord and Taylor.
Lauder still faced enormous challenges. In the late 1940s, as the New York Times reported, the roughly $1 billion beauty business was America’s eighty-fifth largest industry in size, but the second largest in advertising expenditures. And she had a limited budget; in the company’s first year, total sales were just $50,000. Over the next few years, its only print ads were those subsidized by department stores. The name Estée Lauder first appeared in the New York Times in April 1948, when Saks hailed “Estée Lauder beauty props” as “the pretty cosmetics of the…perfectionist making.” By the end of the decade, with about $50,000 in the bank, Lauder tried to hire a major New York City advertising agency to spread the word about her brand. But when her paltry savings did not allow her to get a foot in the door, she was forced to improvise. Confident that customers would snap up her products if only they tried them, Lauder gave away samples and more samples. The businesswoman who as a girl had been desperate to earn and keep her parents’ love had developed a remarkable knack for forging connections with the consumer. Her competitors thought she was nuts. An executive at the perfume manufacturer Charles of the Ritz muttered, “She’ll never get ahead. She’s giving away the whole business.” But she was on to something. “People trooped in to get the free sample,” Leonard Lauder has stated, “liked it and bought it again.” She also recruited new customers by devising the clever innovations Gift with Purchase (G with P) and Purchase with Purchase (P with P), which have since emerged as standard operating procedure in countless industries. Even after the company began investing heavily in print advertising in the early 1960s, it kept passing out all the freebies.
Premium department stores would always remain her focus. “We’re prestige,” Lauder told the New York Times in 1967, “and we refuse to go into stores that are not prestige.” She nixed the idea of following her competitors such as Revlon that sold products at drugstores and supermarkets. According to Lauder, while wide distribution might increase sales in the short-term, it inevitably backfired over time. In the 1980s, as a guest lecturer at a Fashion Institute of Technology class on the cosmetics industry, she stated: “What I’d really like to do, if I could get away with it, is cut my distribution by a third.” Such a shift, she was convinced, could increase her profitability by 50 percent. “Less is more,” she emphasized. Today, the company is still using the same playbook.
“The founders, who were my parents, had two very simple ideas,” Leonard Lauder recently noted, “product quality and narrow distribution to high-end retailers. We never went mass.”
After first conquering Manhattan, Lauder faced the challenge of placing her brand not in more types of stores, but in more of the same kind of stores. To take the rest of the country, throughout the early 1950s she took to the rails. Like Jefferson, Lauder had her share of phobias, and one was a fear of heights, which then prevented her from flying. (But this she would eventually conquer, and by the late 1960s, she was working without any apparent discomfort in her new office on the thirty-seventh floor of the new General Motors Building.) Her compulsion to sell turned her family inside out. She left her two sons in the care of a maid and her husband, who was now also working seven days a week from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. Leonard, then attending the Bronx High School of Science, would make afternoon runs on his bicycle to deliver goods to Saks from the firm’s two small plants in Upper Manhattan. (Since her elder son was already versed in every aspect of the business, Lauder considered letting him run the company while she took a vacation with her husband; but the adolescent came down with the chicken pox, forcing her to abandon the idea.) Though Lauder would not admit it, due to her restless temperament, like Kinsey and Lindbergh, she may well have preferred being on the road to staying at home. One year, she was away twenty-five weeks. While neither of her boys would ever complain, her frequent absences presumably led to considerable confusion and anxiety.
She began the 1950s by opening her two-foot-long counter at the Neiman Marcus flagship store in Dallas. “Estée Lauder came in without an introduction,” the late Stanley Marcus, who took over as company president that same year, told the New Yorker a couple of decades ago. “Barged her way in. She was a cyclone on the selling front. She’d outsell me any day.” After countless phone calls and considerable cajoling, the store finally let her open for business on January 2, 1950. On New Year’s Day, Lauder appeared on a Dallas radio show at 8:15 a.m., the only time she could get. Remarkably, in her autobiography, she boasted of the tall tale that she told that morning: “I’m Estée Lauder just in from Europe with the newest ideas for beauty.…Do let me personally show you how to accomplish the newest beauty tricks from Paris and London.” (At the time, the only connection between her and France was the accent aigu in her faux first name.) “Start the New Year with a new face,” was her sign-off. It worked. Wearing her signature hat with a pink rose, she was inundated by customers early the next day. Her lipstick sold out so fast that she instructed her salesgirl: “Go ahead and sell the tester!”
During the week that she spent in each town opening up a new store, she followed a carefully honed protocol that relied heavily on her obsessions and compulsions. Before attaining vast wealth, she owned just one or two expensive outfits, which she wore over and over again, and everything about her appearance was perfect, including, of course, her personal hygiene. “I’d always be immaculate,” she later wrote. “If you looked shabby or tired or messy, no one in the world would be interested in your opinion on what sells in the beauty field.” She would meet with and touch the face of every beauty editor in town. Behind her perfectly decked-out counters—making the most of every inch, the detail-oriented designer turned each one into “a tiny, shining spa”—Lauder would also touch the face of every customer in sight. And she was goaded on by her relatively mild number fetish. While she wasn’t a rabid counter like Jefferson, Heinz, Dewey, or Kinsey, this hard-nosed businesswoman still enjoyed doing a certain amount of tallying. “Measure your success in dollars, not degrees” would emerge as a favorite maxim. For each day, she set monetary goals—typically a nice round number such as $1,000. Toward the end of business one afternoon in Houston when she was making her first foray into the Sakowitz store, she took off her shoes and counted her receipts. Her take stood at $998, which threw her into a temporary tizzy. “Oh no,” she said to herself, as she rushed to meet a woman who had just made it through a closing door. Quickly slipping her shoes back on, she started hawking some eye cream that sold for $2.95. In an effort to clinch the sale, she startled the customer by announcing that the cream would smooth out the wrinkles on the side of her mouth. “That did it,” Lauder later wrote. “Letting my shoes drop off, I sank into my chair and grinned my most victorious grin.”
But like other obsessives, Lauder would rarely stay put for long. “She rests,” a colleague once told Mademoiselle, “by doing something else hard.”
To use a beauty metaphor, Youth Dew, first introduced at Bonwit Teller in 1953, would lay the foundation for Lauder’s worldwide cosmetics empire. By the mid-1950s, the perfume, which she would compulsively spritz wherever she went—including elevators and restaurants—would generate about 80 percent of her sales at department stores. “It was impossible to get rid of the smell. It lasted forever,” recalled Marylin Bender. And Lauder would mine this core characteristic to bring Youth Dew (and thus her entire treatment line) to the land of Chanel. When the buyer at the Galeries Lafayette in Paris would not see her, Lauder spilled a considerable amount on the floor. Over the next couple of days, as the fragrance lingered, customers kept asking about the source, and the department store soon had no choice but to carry it. Spritzing became a permanent part of her playbook. “Whenever I have a fragrance promotion,” she wrote in 1985, “I ask my salespeople to spray some scent on the counters, and in the air to attract the customer.…My little Parisian ‘accident’ set the stage.”
With Youth Dew putting her on the map, Lauder felt emboldened to make an experiment. In 1957, she brought out a moisturizing cream called Re-Nutriv—the moniker highlighted its supposedly medicinal properties—for which she charged a staggering $115 ($950 today) for a sixteen-ounce (one-pound) jar. While critics insisted that the sticker price would scare away customers, she sensed that the opposite might be true. Her gamble was a radical move. Until then, all her products had been moderately priced; Youth Dew Bath Oil, for example, cost from $3.75 to $22.50, depending on the size of the container. Likewise, the upscale creams manufactured by competitors such as Helena Rubinstein typically retailed for under $30 for an eight-ounce jar.
As Lauder predicted, her “Crème of Creams” elicited lots of free media coverage precisely because of its sky-high price. She also took out full-page ads in Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue featuring a Hitchcockesque model under the headline, “What Makes a Cream Worth $115?” (Lauder had not yet begun hiring her string of famous blonde and blue-eyed models, such as Karen Graham, the company’s official representative in the 1970s and 1980s, whom the public often assumed was her.) By way of explanation, the accompanying text alluded to “the rare perception of a woman like Estée Lauder who knows almost better than anyone how to keep you looking younger, fresher, lovelier than you ever dreamed possible.” It would be hard to contest this assertion, as Rose Mentzer’s youngest daughter had indeed been thinking of little else for decades. The ad also referenced some rare ingredients, such as turtle oil and royal jelly, and twenty secret ingredients, to which only members of the family were privy. The claim of high production costs noted by her copywriters, however, was less well grounded, as Lauder herself would acknowledge.
Quoting from the sales spiel that she delivered in department stores across the country, she wrote in her autobiography: “‘Why do you spend so much for a Picasso? The linen under his painting costs two dollars and seventy-five cents, each jar of paint he used was perhaps a dollar seventy-five—perhaps the material cost a total of eleven dollars. Why, then, do you pay a small fortune for a small picture? You’re paying for creativity, that’s why.’” Remarkably, few customers, journalists, or industry analysts were troubled by her grandiose comparisons, and the cream flew off the shelves. This campaign, wrote British author Mark Tungate in his book, Branded Beauty: How Marketing Changed the Way We Look (2011), “combined all the best (or worst) attributes of beauty marketing: snobbery, emotional blackmail, the cult of celebrity, faux continental sophistication, and pseudo-science.” She had devised a magic formula, which would transform her industry. While Lauder was still a relatively small player—sales did not hit $1 million until 1960—rival firms were already beginning to copy her when developing and marketing new products.
By 1965, sales were up to $15 million, as Re-Nutriv led to huge new income streams. In its new manufacturing plant on Long Island, the company also churned out large jars, which looked like Fabergé eggs, priced at a few hundred bucks a pop. Lauder also stuck tiny dabs in other products, such as face powder and lipsticks, which helped her justify the high prices for her “prestige brand.” In 1962, for example, she charged $3.50 for her new “French Peach” lipstick, which, as the New York Times ad noted, featured “the creamy richness of her Re-Nutriv formula.” That year, few other lipsticks ran anywhere near $3; Arden’s Regal Red Lipstick cost $2 and Revlon’s Lustrous Lipstick cost only $1.10. As a rule, retail prices for lipstick have always been based on higher markups than any other beauty product. As Andrew Tobias has reported, the Nail Man’s costs for Lustrous Lipstick came to only 9.6 cents per tube; her gross margins for those Re-Nutriv–laced lipsticks were, in all likelihood, also over 90 percent.
Lauder plowed a sizable chunk of her excess cash into trophy real estate. As with other obsessives, her homes emerged as a vehicle through which she could express her love of organizing and collecting. In 1955, after reaping the first wave of Youth Dew profits, she moved out of her West End Avenue apartment and into her first Upper East Side town house, which, despite its gold-plated bathroom fixtures, she would later dismiss as “informal.” A few years later, she bought her first place in Palm Beach, a small Spanish-style dwelling located on Route Trail, then the least fashionable part of the tony town.
Over the next decade, she upgraded. In 1964, she switched to a villa on the ocean in Palm Beach—“an English home, not a beach home,” as she was fond of saying. Three years later, she dropped $500,000 (about $10 million today) on a twenty-five-room, eight-bathroom, nine-fireplace town house on East Seventy-Fifth Street in Manhattan, which most visitors referred to as “a castle.” As the New York Times reported shortly after her move-in day, the living room, whose walls were draped with Flemish tapestries, was so massive that the grand piano in the corner “looked like an abandoned toy.” The powder room on the main floor was lined with shelves overflowing with her cosmetics—lipsticks, face powders, and rouges, as well as her Re-Nutriv Cream (fittingly enough, as it was “the cream that bought the house”). As she proudly reminded the Times, her crème of creams, whose price was then $20 an ounce, “is the most expensive in the world and is our greatest seller.” Of her rationale for leaving out all that product, she explained: “I want my guests to be able to do their faces over completely.” (That explanation may have been only half true; she probably also relished the chance to get in a little extra face touching.)
By 1967, Lauder also owned a villa in Cannes, which she described in her autobiography as “immaculately clean.” According to the Boston Globe, the neatnik “liked lots of shine” in her homes; maids were constantly waxing her already waxed drawing room floors with furniture polish. Not one to deny herself any material comforts, Lauder would later acquire an apartment in London—the blue-and-white wallpaper in her bedroom was modeled on that used by Jefferson in Monticello—as well as a massive home with Corinthian columns on Long Island. But like Lindbergh, she felt more comfortable on the go than at any of her palatial homes stuffed with Chippendale furniture and Meissen china. As the late fashion maven Eleanor Lambert has stated, “Estée let her houses live her…she didn’t live in them.”
By the early 1960s, Lauder had finally attained the vast wealth of which her public persona (“Estée Lauder”) had long been boasting and her private persona (“Esther Mentzer”) had long been dreaming. She now set her sights on developing the prominent social connections that she might have already had, had she actually descended from Viennese aristos. This step was all about business. “Her Palm Beach social life,” William Lauder told me, “embodied what the brand stood for.” The society pages constituted another theater in her ongoing war with her rivals such as Revlon—which, in the late 1960s, was still more than ten times the size of her company—and the fierce competitor dug in her heels. “The icons of fashion, those were the sophisticated people whom we were trying to reach,” said Michael Gibbons, a retired marketing executive who began his long career with the company in 1967.
Of Lauder’s attempts to ingratiate herself with her rich and famous “targets,” Erica Titus Friedman, a frequent luncheon companion, has stated, “She tried too hard, but she was very determined.” Just as Lauder used gifts to win customers, she distributed baskets of her products to gain entry into the balls and benefits held at Palm Beach’s exclusive venues such as the controversial Everglades Club (which to this day has few, if any, Jewish members). In the mid-1960s, she reeled in the biggest fish of all—the Duchess of Windsor, whom she called “the most attractive woman in the world.” In Lauder’s version, they first met aboard an ocean liner and it was the Duchess who was eager to meet her: the Duchess had long been such a fan of hers that the Elizabeth Arden rep who made her up before parties used Estée Lauder products. But a more likely explanation, now widely accepted, is that their relationship began through a carefully orchestrated surgical strike; one day, just as the Duchess and her husband, the former King Edward VIII, were about to board a train bound for New York at the West Palm Beach station, Lauder “accidentally” bumped into her in front of a photographer, whose snapshot soon was transmitted around the world. However the bond was forged, it solidified quickly.
Within a couple of years, Lauder was hosting the couple’s anniversary dinner and papers were reporting that her personal friend the Duchess does not “hesitate to test the newest Lauder products and tell [her] buddy if it’s good or bad.” Her social circle would also include Princess Grace of Monaco and her Palm Beach neighbor Rose Kennedy, a frequent visitor to her home for afternoons of tennis and a makeover.
As a CEO, Lauder could appear flighty—in business meetings, she often rambled—but she was totally focused when she had to be. “She sees and absorbs everything,” a company executive once told Vogue. “You may think she has forgotten or not noticed, but when there is a scrap of information to fit in with a lot of others, it’s there—been there all along.” Michael Gibbons recalled a trip to Chicago with her in 1969 to open up a counter at Bonwit Teller, which had just completed its move across Michigan Avenue. “At a party at the store the evening before the opening, a Revlon executive was upset with its company’s location on the floor. Afterwards, at dinner, she told me and my colleagues, ‘They are going to move us.’ We did not think it possible. But she insisted that we go back after dinner. At 11:30 that night, we moved our booth back where it was originally supposed to go.”
By the late 1960s, Lauder had handed off the day-to-day operations of the company to Leonard, then in his thirties. The working alliance between the self-described “stern taskmaster…[who] expected perfection…and then a little more perfection when perfection is offered” and her elder son was not always smooth. A decade earlier, on Leonard’s first day on the job, Lauder announced that she and Joe were going on a two-month vacation to Florida; while Leonard was often jolted by her mercurial and demanding ways, after several years, they ironed out the kinks. She remained the company’s public face who had final say over all products—she hated false eyelashes, so they were nixed.
In 1973, when the thirty-nine-year-old Leonard officially replaced her as president, he described himself to Marylin Bender as a cross between his parents. A perfectionist like his mother, he was driven by a fierce ambition that could “keep everyone on their toes.” To motivate his staff, Leonard would blurt out, “I want you nervous. I want you to be nervous. Are you nervous?” And like his father, he could “direct and organize vast logistical movements.” In contrast to Leonard, who said nothing publicly about the tension, Lauder alluded to “many heated discussions” in her autobiography. “My father,” William Lauder explained to me, “was her son as well as her business partner and rival. But the relationship was symbiotic. They both recognized that they needed each other. He could not do what he wanted without her, and she could not do what she wanted without him.”
Both sons are chips off the old block. Ronald and Leonard also have obsessive traits, though Ronald has never been as excited about business as his elder brother. Ronald’s heart has always been in collecting. “I first became interested in art at thirteen,” he told me. “I guided my parents, who never had time to learn about it. I grew up around great style, and I knew what they liked.” The man who founded Manhattan’s Neue Galerie Museum for German and Austrian Art in 2001 bought his first canvas of the Austrian great Egon Schiele with his bar mitzvah money. As the New Yorker noted in its 2007 profile, “An Acquiring Eye,” this megacollector—Glenn Lowry, the director of the Museum of Modern Art, has called his private holdings “the finest collection of modern art assembled by an individual in the world today”—has “given himself the grand, cultured Viennese heritage to which Estée Lauder pretended.” While most of Leonard’s obsessionality has been plowed into the company, he, too, has dabbled as an art collector. He has made several donations of prominent American artworks to Manhattan’s Whitney Museum. Ever since the age of six—back when he was coping with the interregnum in his parents’ marriage—Leonard has also been accumulating postcards; he started by spending his five-cent allowance on five cards of the Empire State Building. At present, his collection, which he plans to donate to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, features 125,000 items encompassing numerous subgenres, such as artists’ postcards, sports postcards, advertising postcards, and fashion postcards. His late wife Evelyn, Leonard told the New Yorker in 2012, “often said my postcard collection was my mistress.”
Estée Lauder wanted both her boys to work in the family biz, and in the mid-1960s, not long after finishing business school at Wharton, Ronald also came on board. In 1968, when she rolled out Clinique, a new line of medically sanctioned skin-care products, she named Ronald its executive vice president. Under his leadership, a decade later, Clinique’s sales came to $80 million, nearly 30 percent of the company’s total. After dabbling in politics in the 1980s—in 1983, he worked in the Reagan Defense Department as deputy assistant secretary, and in 1986 he was appointed U.S. ambassador to Austria—he spent a decade as chairman of Estée Lauder International. In 1995, Ronald also became chairman of Clinique—now the bestselling prestige makeup line in the United States and most of the 130 other countries in which it is sold—a position that he still holds. As peripatetic as his mother ever was, Ronald now also runs several businesses of his own, including a leading TV station in Central Europe.
On October 16, 1979, the seventy-one-year-old Lauder, having already enjoyed a couple of decades of spectacular wealth and fame, was forced to endure fifteen minutes of terror. At five thirty that afternoon, three gun-toting intruders stormed past her maid and into her Manhattan mansion. Lauder immediately locked herself in her third-floor bedroom, but two of the robbers rushed up the stairs and kicked in the door, threatening to kill her if she did not cooperate. After one man smacked her across the face, she opened the two wall safes containing her jewelry. Though tied to a chair, a relatively unscathed Lauder made a rather gutsy move that could have been life-threatening. Wiggling around on the floor, she activated the silent alarm button that was hooked up to police headquarters. After noticing what she had done, the thieves collected their heist and immediately dashed out of the house. Two minutes later, the police arrived. As with other obsessives, Lauder’s nervous system worked backward. While too little to do could raise her anxiety level, too much to do—or even danger—could reduce it. The police sergeant who spoke to her that afternoon told the New York Post that she was “quite calm, unusually calm” about the robbery, in which she lost about a million dollars in jewelry as well as $6,000 in cash. “I’m not a bit disturbed,” she told the paper. This perfectionist would always pride herself on her emotional control. “They took a few things that were lying around,” she added, “but nothing important.” In her autobiography, however, she would finally acknowledge the truth, stating, “I gave them everything.” For the rest of her life, she would be protected by bodyguards.
Three years later, Lauder was felled by another blow, one from which she would never fully recover. On January 15, 1983, the fifty-third anniversary of her first wedding, Joe collapsed and died during a dinner at Ronald’s Manhattan home. Lauder’s remarkable control over her public image (and the news media) came through loud and clear in the vague New York Times obituary. The paper of record was reduced to guesstimating her husband’s age, reporting that he was “in his 70s.” He was actually eighty.
While many women of her generation were reluctant to reveal their age, Lauder’s desire to keep her birthdate hidden was extreme. As her grandson William told me, when he was carrying her passport on a trip to Austria in the mid-1980s, she insisted that he not take a peek. So determined was she to keep her secret that she also kept a tight lid on the age of other family members—namely, her husband and elder son. Leonard was under strict orders not to be open about his age, unless otherwise directed. As Lauder acknowledged in her autobiography, when asked, Leonard would reply, “I’ll have to ask my mother.…I’ll check on what I am this week and let you know.” In 1988, in an effort to keep her secret, she would ask her fifty-five-year-old son to paint his graying hair. The 1983 Times obituary also failed to mention where her husband’s burial took place. The venue, the Beth El Cemetery in Paramus, New Jersey, where her father, Max, had once roamed with his horses, may well have struck the family as too Jewish.
The loss of her husband was overwhelming. Joe had been not just her spouse, but also her surrogate mother, who had given her the attention that she had never received from the anxious and overburdened Rose back in Corona. For the next several weeks, Lauder retreated to the upstairs bedroom of Ronald’s nearby Manhattan town house. Her nose, she figured, could help bring her out of her despair, and over the next couple of years, she put her energy into developing a new fragrance, Beautiful. As she was racing around the country during the launch in 1986, she told the New Yorker, “Hard work never killed anyone.…Smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone.…I found that out after Joe died.” But for the first time in her life, burying her emotions in her work was no longer working. “After 1986, she was meaningfully less active. At the time, we did not appreciate how much of an effect my grandfather’s death was still having on her,” William Lauder told me.
From then on, her public appearances would be limited. In December 1988, Raisa Gorbachev, who was in Manhattan to attend an event at the United Nations, headed up to the thirty-seventh floor of the General Motors Building, where she sampled Beautiful and a few other perfumes. After their forty-five-minute meeting, Lauder, apparently frustrated because she did not get to dab her visitor, told the New York Times: “I want her to come back and talk about skin.” Two years later, when Leonard Lauder introduced Origins, a frail Lauder would head down to its retail outlet in Soho with William, then the vice president of this line of natural skin-care products. “She loved standing behind the counter,” her grandson stated, “and waiting on customers.” By 1993, when she went to Florida for the last time, Alzheimer’s was starting to set in. “Both her mother and her sister, Renée, suffered from the disease. Her sister’s came quite early when I was still in my teens,” added William. Lauder would die, attended by nurses, in her Manhattan town house in 2004. She was ninety-five.
By the end of this Queen of Beauty’s long reign, her family knew exactly how to defuse the rough edges of her obsessionality. In 1989, as the company was reshuffling its offices in the GM Building as part of an expansion—Lauder’s office was moved up from the thirty-seventh floor to the fortieth—Leonard was nervous about showing his mother the renovation. Relaying the story to me, a smiling William Lauder explained: “My father told one of his assistants, ‘Break something. Something that isn’t important.’ The next day, as my eighty-year-old grandmother was entering her new quarters, she stopped and snapped, ‘The door handle isn’t working. They didn’t do it right. That needs to be fixed right away.’ She then let out a big sigh of relief and was quiet for the rest of the day. Order was restored.”