27

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

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

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

Then there was Mr. Revson.

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

“Charlie?”

“Charlie Revson.”

“Oh, yes, Mr. Revson,” Mimi said.

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

“Certainly,” Mimi said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m sorry, Mr. Revson, but—”

“It’s Charlie, I told you. Listen, just move out of my territory, and we’ll be pals.”

“I’m sorry, but if Saks wants to buy my products, I intend to sell to them.”

“Listen,” he said, “nobody fucks around with Charlie. Understand? If you think I’m going to sit on my ass and let some fucking debutante bimbo move in on my territory, you’ve got another fucking think coming, sweetheart.”

“I was never a debutante, Mr. Revson,” she said.

“Listen,” he said. “I haven’t got all day to shoot the breeze with some bimbo. Let’s get down to brass tacks. How much do you want for your company?”

“I’m sorry. My company is not for sale.”

“Don’t hand me that shit. I’m asking you to name your price.”

“I have no price.”

“Everybody’s got a price. Name yours.”

“I’m sorry. I have none.”

There was a silence. Then he said, “Okay, twat, then listen to me. There isn’t room enough in this town for you and me both. Understand? I made a friendly offer, and you turned it down. Well, if you’re turning a friendly offer into a fight, you know who’s going to win? Me, that’s who. Because Charlie Revson isn’t going to let some little broad bitch move into his market. So you know what I’m going to do, twat? I’m going to ruin you. Wait and see. When I get through with you, you won’t know your asshole from the Grand Canyon. I’ll mop up the streets with you, bimbo, because nobody fucks around with Charlie. You’re going to regret we had this conversation, twat.”

“I believe,” Mimi said evenly, “that it was you who made this call.” Then she hung up, shaking with anger.

Then, as she recovered from the shock of her first encounter with the famously despotic Charles Revson, a dim memory floated into Mimi’s mind. She let it hang there for a moment or two, savoring it, testing it, trying it on, as it were, for size. Then she picked up the telephone again and called the executive offices of Revlon.

After making her way through a considerable battery of receptionists and secretaries, with each of whom she had to identify herself and answer the questions, “What is the name of your company? Will Mr. Revson know the nature of your business with him? Will he know the purpose of this call?” she finally got the great man on the line.

“Yeah?” he said.

“Charlie, it’s Mimi,” she said.

“Yeah. You’ve changed your mind. You’re wising up.”

“Not exactly,” she said. “But I did want to remind you of something.”

“Yeah?”

“That quiz show you’re sponsoring called Catch Me If You Can. With Prince Fritzi von Maulsen as one of your contestants, and NBC’s quiz consultant.”

“Yeah, what about it?”

“Wouldn’t it look rather awkward for Revlon if it came out that His Royal Highness gets the answers to his questions fed to him ahead of time? I want you to know I’m worried for you, Charlie.”

There was a prolonged silence, and for a moment Mimi thought the connection had been broken. Then Charles Revson said, “Cunt!”

Mimi hung up the phone again, deeply satisfied.

Her next call was to Washington. Old Senator Willoughby had been a good friend of her grandfather’s. “Uncle Bucky?” she said when she reached him at the Senate Office Building. “I’ll tell you why I’m calling. There’s been talk that some of these big-money quiz shows on television are rigged, and that the public is being deceived. It occurred to me that this is something Congress might want to look into. It could be a lively issue for you, Uncle Bucky, since I know you’ll be running for reelection in the fall.…”

That night when she came home, Brad noticed the expression on her face. “You’re grinning like a Cheshire cat,” he said. “That’s a real ear-to-ear grin. What’s up?”

She laughed her ripply laugh and told him about her conversations with Charlie Revson.

He whistled softly. “Do you know something?” he said. “I think you’re really going to be good at this business.”

“And do you know something else?” she said. “I think so, too. And for the first time since Daddy died, I think I’m going to be successful!”

“But I always knew that,” he said.

Meanwhile, in the Willoughby Committee investigations of rigged TV quiz programs that followed later that year, a disgraced and shamefaced Prince Fritzi von Maulsen admitted that many of his answers to the more obscure questions were given to him before the show went on the air, and that the appealing grimacings and furrowings of his handsome brow as he appeared to be struggling to come up with answers were all carefully rehearsed beforehand, with the help of a television acting coach. At the time, the executives of the sponsoring Revlon company did their best to distance themselves from the day-to-day production details that went into the show. They had no knowledge, they insisted, of what went on backstage. But they all, including Mr. Revson, appeared deeply embarrassed by the committee’s findings, and took Catch Me If You Can off the air.

And Prince Fritzi was fired from his $5O,000-a-year job.

As I mentioned earlier, Mimi has been called a “visionary” in the cosmetics industry. But it would be wrong to assume that she, or anyone else in the business for that matter, is somehow endowed with powers of clairvoyance. Rather, the innovations in cosmetics fashion that she has brought about have been the result of much careful thought and no small amount of research. For instance, in October of 1963, when she had been head of Miray for a little more than a year, she prepared the first of her famous interoffice memos, proposing a new direction for the company.

MIRAY CORPORATION

Interoffice Memorandum

TO: All employees

FROM: MM

SUBJECT: Eyes

I remember my grandfather saying that this is a business that can’t exist without news. “If a manufacturer has to pretend that there’s news, he’s in trouble,” he said. And right now I think I have spotted a trend that is going to be big news.

As you know, my grandfather started in this business with nail polish. He then moved on into coordinated lipstick shades, and then into face and hair-care products. Last year, the “pale look,” with pale makeup and white lipstick, enjoyed a mercifully brief period of popularity. Right now, I have reason to believe, the pendulum is beginning to swing in the opposite direction. Over at Revlon, I have heard, they are developing something called the “Toasty Look,” a brownish lipstick accompanied by pale brown makeup, and from Paris I have heard rumors that a French manufacturer is about to spring a lipstick shade called “Cafe Noir,” a black-coffee color with a coffee taste as well. But I don’t think the trend toward darker shades is going to end with lipsticks. I think it is going to move upward on a woman’s face—to the eyes.

Specifically, I have been studying photographs of the actress Brigitte Bardot, as she has been evolving into a major film star. Bardot’s principal beauty flaw is that she has too-large lips. In order to draw attention away from this flaw, she—or, more likely, those who supervise her makeup—have chosen to increasingly emphasize her eyes. Furthermore, though eye shadow has been traditionally used only to cover the upper eyelid, Bardot is now shading her eyes all the way up to her brows. At a fashion show in Los Angeles the other day, a model came down the ramp wearing black eye shadow above and below her eyes. A few minutes later, another appeared wearing red shadow above and below, and, on top of that, a third model appeared with one eye done in shades of green and blue and the other in shades of violet and navy. This is just gimmicky stuff, of course, but my feeling is that the eyes are going to provide women with their chief beauty focus for at least the next few years.

I am asking our lab technicians to develop a complete line of eye makeup products—pencils, eyeshadows, eye “glitter,” mascara, false lashes, etc. I am also offering a prize of $10,000 to any employee who can come up with a device that will make the application of mascara easier—instead of the current, messy way, involving the mascara “cake” and brush.

Eye Makeup: A Brief History

Women—and men, too—have been making up their eyes for at least 6,000 years, in ancient Egypt, Rome, throughout India and the Near East, and in Europe. According to folklore, the eyes were shaded in order to ward off the “evil eye.” If you look directly into another person’s eyes, your own tiny image will appear reflected in the dark of the other person’s pupil. In fact, the word pupil comes from the Latin pupilla, meaning “little doll.” To the superstitious, this indicated that some sort of transference could take place—that one person could capture another by staring directly into his eyes. But darkly painted circles around the eyes absorb sunlight and consequently minimize reflected glare into the eye. Ever wonder why football and baseball players smear black grease under their eyes before games? That’s why.

By 4000 B.C., the Egyptians had zeroed in on the eye as the chief focus for facial makeup. They preferred green eye shadow, made from powdered malachite, a green copper ore, and they applied this heavily to both the upper and the lower eyelids. Outlining the eyes and darkening the lashes and eyebrows were achieved with a black paste called kohl, made from powdered antimony, burnt almonds, black copper oxide, and brown clay ocher. Scores of jars of kohl have been unearthed in archaeological digs, their contents intact and still usable!

Fashionable Egyptian men and women also wore history’s first eye glitter. In a mortar, they crushed the iridescent shells of beetles into a coarse powder, then mixed it with their malachite eye shadow, using a little spit!

My lab technicians assure me that modern science has synthesized some more appetizing ingredients for eye makeup!

It was this memo that launched Miray into eye products in the 1960s. And it was the idea for an automatic, roll-on mascara, which Mimi christened “Mas-Carismatic,” that launched the career of Mark Segal in the company. At the time, he was working in the mailroom (where he was first to read this memo), and now, of course, he is the advertising director of Miray.

And this memo was the first of many “Mimi Memos,” which, over the years, would make her as famous in the beauty business for writing long, detailed memos as David O. Selznick was in Hollywood.