Pink is the signature color for a number of icons: the plastic princess Barbie, the too-cute feline of Hello Kitty fame, the teenaged ladies from Grease. Yet, one lady predated these bright-hued females, and her relationship with pink left her rolling in the green.
“You can do it, Mary Kay!” These were the words of encouragement Lulu Wagner gave her youngest child, Mary Kathlyn Wagner. With Lulu’s husband bedridden from a bout of tuberculosis and her 5:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. daily shift as a waitress in the whistle-stop town of Hot Wells, Texas, she had precious little else to offer. As Mary Kay’s siblings had left home, the seven-year-old was left with the care of her father and the household chores. An overachiever, all through school she out-typed, out-debated, and outshone her classmates. When her best friend could afford to go to college and Mary Kay could not, she managed to upstage her friend at age seventeen when she married musician Ben Rogers, a member of a local band, the Hawaiian Strummers. Unable to afford a place of their own, the couple occupied a bedroom at her mother’s house. Upon Ben’s return from duty in World War II, he demanded a divorce; it was not only his guitar he strummed. Although Mary Kay acknowledged their marriage had cracks, the desertion left her at the lowest point of her life. However, with three children to raise—deadbeat dad was MIA—rather than wallow in depression, she peddled housewares for Stanley Home Products, a direct sales company. After three weeks, she borrowed twelve dollars to travel to the company’s annual convention in Dallas, where that year’s Queen of Sales won an alligator bag as a reward. For the next year, she carried a picture of an alligator bag, and each week, she wrote her sales goals in soap on her bathroom mirror. At the next convention, the company crowned Mary Kay Queen; to her disappointment, her prize was a trophy.
In addition to despair at the demise of her marriage, Mary Kay was embittered by her employer, who denied her an opportunity to ascend the corporate ladder because she wore a skirt in a suit-and-tie world. The final straw for her was when the man she had trained received a position that made him her superior, earning twice her salary. In 1952, after twenty-five years of service, she quit. Mary Kay, in trademark Texas drawl, groused, “Those men didn’t believe a woman had brain matter at all. I learned back then that as long as men didn’t believe women could do anything, women were never going to have a chance.”
Mary Kay’s next foray into business was at World Gift Co., a home accessories firm. During her eleven-year employment, through her indefatigable efforts, distribution expanded into forty-three states. Stricken in 1957 by a disease characterized by uncontrollable spasms that twisted the left side of her face into a permanent grimace, despite preoccupation about her looks, she wore sunglasses until she could afford medical treatment. The term “glass ceiling” had yet to be coined; however, Mary Kay bumped her perfectly coiffed head on it time after time until she resigned in 1963.
At age forty-five, Mrs. Hallenback—the surname of her second husband George―was unwilling to admit defeat, but was understandably reluctant to attempt a third foray into the patriarchy who responded to her suggestions with, “Oh, Mary Kay, you’re thinking just like a woman.” On a memorable morning—one that was to change her life and those of untold women—Mary Kay sat at her kitchen table and made two lists on a yellow legal pad. On the first were the good experiences she had had in the business world and on the second were the bad experiences, such as the rampant sexism that allowed only males to sit at the top of the hierarchy and command the big bucks. After staring at the paper, the middle-aged matron slapped her hand to her assisted blonde hair. She realized she could turn her lists into a blueprint for a dream company—staffed with a female workforce who had to juggle the demands of career and child care. Her vision entailed the idea that, instead of trying to crack the old boys’ network, ladies could strike out on their own. Now that she had a plan, she had to come up with a product.
Mary Kay derived the idea for a skin-care line from Ova Heath Spoonemore, a hostess at a Stanley Home Products party where Mary Kay had been in attendance. When the official business ended, Ova had handed out jars with penciled labels to her guests, explaining they contained the secret to skin care. Her father, an Arkansas tanner, had given her the formula after he noticed his hands looked younger than his face due to the solutions. Mary Kay had been using it for a decade and said that after a Stanley demonstration, clients would invariably ask, “We know about that bowl cleaner. Tell us what you did to your face.” Mary Kay bought the rights to the product for $500, found a way to get rid of its skunk-scent odor, and packaged it in pink. George, who had planned to go into business with his wife, had died a month earlier from a heart attack at their kitchen table. She decided to carry on with her plan that entailed investing her savings of $5,000, despite the advice of her lawyer and accountant, who tried to dissuade her from striking out on her own. She offered this explanation of her refusal to back down: “The answer is I was middle-aged, had varicose veins and I didn’t have time to fool around. Have you heard the definition of a woman’s needs? From fourteen to forty, she needs good looks, from forty to sixty, she needs personality, and I’m here to tell you that after sixty, she needs cash.”
The eponymous business opened with nine saleswomen and Mary Kay’s twenty-year-old son, Richard Rogers. Its philosophy embraced the founder’s mantra: God first, family second, career third. Another guiding light was that being female was not a liability. Beauty by Mary Kay, its initial name, debuted in a five-hundred-square-foot storefront manned by nine of her closest gal pals. All products were pink and sold by consultants on a private basis. In an era when women could not sign their names on bank loans, Mary Kay cosmetics offered the housewife financial opportunities as well as self-esteem.
By the mid 1980s, the company was at its zenith, and some twenty thousand preening beauty consultants swooped into the Dallas Convention Center in full plumage: arched brows penciled in, a flurry of false eyelashes, and rouged cheeks. En masse, their flawlessly polished, razor-sharp fingernails could have readily put a sizeable dent in an armored car. But the ladies were not bent on acts of destruction; rather, they had gathered to hear, cheer, and revere their founder. Mary Kay Ash, the mascaraed Moses, led these women to the promised land of financial autonomy. She often quoted from a book entitled Rhinoceros Success: “Don’t sit back and be a cow, be a six-thousand-pound rhino. Charge!” The diminutive leader micromanaged every aspect of her empire, even on the cusp of age seventy. She was always coy as to the year of her birth and commented, “A woman who will tell her age will tell anything.”
In a brilliant stroke of marketing, Mary Kay organized annual seminars where her top-grossing consultants were publicly feted. The initial 1964 get-together took place in a warehouse decorated with balloons and crepe paper, and the high priestess of pink cooked chicken for two hundred people and made the jalapeno dressing and Jell-O salad, served on paper plates. The prizes became ever glitzier: diamond baubles, coats that once were on the backs of minks, and the crème de la crème, a pink Cadillac. (Winners received a pink Mercedes in Germany and a pink Toyota in Taiwan.) By 1994, consultants had claimed seven thousand cars, valued at more than $100 million. The prizes were presented amidst a show that rivaled those in Las Vegas. At the close of the evening, the emcee would introduce the head honcho, known as the Queen of Queens, who would waltz to the microphone to conclude the evening, saying, “God didn’t have time to make a nobody, only a somebody!”
Mary Kay’s wealth allowed her to dress in sequined splendor, a mink stole draped over her shoulders, an alligator bag on her arm, but the girl from hole-in-the-wall Hot Wells never lost touch with her roots. In her elaborate galas, often attended by representatives from the Harvard School of Business, she would startle a maid sneaking a smoke by a dumpster and address her as if she were the earth’s only other inhabitant, “How are you?” Then, leaving the woman behind in her well-perfumed wake, “You’re great! Fake it till you make it!”
Mary Kay’s indefatigable spirit never deserted, even when she found herself single for the third time upon the death of Mel Ash, the husband who had provided the happiest of her marriages. The widow explained her refusal to take a fourth foray into matrimony by saying that the available pool of men were seeking someone who would provide a purse and a nurse. She explained, “There are a lot of affluent men at my church (Baptist) who are dateable, but they’re scared to death of me because they consider me so much more successful—and that’s threatening to a man’s ego.” The diminutive rhinoceros charged ahead until age seventy-eight, when a stroke obliged her to relinquish the reins of her company to her son.
Mary Kay turned down an avalanche of invitations, as she was disinterested in being a fixture in Dallas society. She explained, “I enjoy the Fortune 500 people but not as a steady diet. I’m not interested in yaw-ting or social functions.” The fact that Mrs. Ash would rather have been at home was not surprising. Her $5 million mansion was a thirty-room pink palace, replete with Grecian pool, crystal chandeliers, and eleven bathrooms, one modeled after Liberace’s, a dear friend. Acres of sea-green carpet flowed beneath the twenty-eight-foot-ceilings, and in the drawing-room stood a nine-foot grand piano that played a constant stream of Liberace cassettes. Of course, the garage housed a pink Cadillac. A security guard generally shadowed the diminutive multimillionaire, even as she pushed her cart at the local supermarket. In the evenings, the woman who owned 1.7 million shares of her company’s stock was a devoted coupon clipper, intent on finding the best place to chow down on a chili dog. An ordinary evening chez Mrs. Ash was spent watching Hawaii Five-O reruns, poring over a condensed whodunit in a Reader’s Digest collection, and sifting through the paperwork in her alligator bag. Before retiring, and after slathering Mary Kay creams on her face and body, she always made a list of six goals for the following day. One of these was to become an author, and she wrote the third of her autobiographies just shy of age eighty, Mary Kay—You Can Have It All. Her morning ritual entailed putting on a full face of makeup, including eyelashes, while in the background played motivational tapes. Mrs. Ash never left home without her diamond-studded bumble brooch, the size of a kumquat. It became the company symbol after Mary Kay learned that, aerodynamically, the bumblebee should not be able to fly—its wings are too fragile to hold up its plump body. Mary Kay commented, “It’s just like our women who didn’t know they could fly to the top, but they did.”