—Sidney G. Stricker

former Revlon vice president

As good as Charles Revson was with products, that's how bad he was with people. He was a savvy marketing man and a lousy boss. He had qualities of great leadership, and could milk the most out of many of his people, but he was about the last man in the world any but a very special breed would want to work for. He was sort of a cross between a Vince Lombardi—tough, demanding, but you would give your life for him—and a Captain Queeg—petty, demeaning, paranoid. He also paid very well.

A lot depended on you:

If you were a bright guy with a flashy resume, a wife and kids in Mamaroneck, and a nine-to-six professional executive's mentality, you could be in for trouble. You would represent a challenge to Revson, for one thing—a chance for the crude, self-educated, self-made Revson to take on your Princeton B.A. and your Chicago M.B.A. and your upper-middle-class upbringing, and win. Could you possibly be as good as you had cracked yourself up to be? Could you offer the kind of dedication this fanatic wanted of all his people? Could you even understand what it was he was trying to say to you?

But if you were street-smart, and tough, and not easily cowed, but ready to give your heart and soul for the company; if you never tried to bullshit him, but knew how to "handle" him nonetheless; if the chemistry were right and you really had the talent . . . then you might last for some time.

If the "divorce" did come, be you wife, brother, or executive, you might never talk to him again, no matter how long you had known him. (He wouldn't let Ancky or Lyn visit him in the hospital when he was dying.)

Generally, if you were a hotshot, you peaked remarkably early. And then, even if it were not for another year, you were as good as gone. Revson would fire you in his mind a year before anyone else knew it, explains Bill Mandel, for years the heir apparent.

"The first real problem was over publicity. Victor Barnett called me into his office and said that Mr. Revson was aware that everybody knew how much I had gotten to come with the company, and he was not pleased. I took it very immaturely . . . 'fuck you' . . . I was interested only in my own stardom, and I liked all the publicity I was getting in Women's Wear. Barnett said that Mr. Revson did not like it, which makes sense from their side—the publicity is supposed to be for Revlon, not Joel Schumacher."

"Did Victor Barnett hate you?" Schumacher is asked.

"I think so. But he couldn't have hated me as much as I hated him. We traded mean words."

Two more different people than Joel Schumacher and Victor Barnett are hard to imagine. For his own style of dress and general bearing, Mr. Victor was known to some around Revlon as the Mortician, Charles Revson was one of the few people who appreciated him, and with whom he was on good terms. Harry Meresman, his father-in-law, was another. Sir Isaac Wolfson, his uncle, was a third. (Never has life imitated caricature quite so wonderfully as at Charles Revson's funeral. While everyone else simply walked into the temple and took a seat, the Mortician—attired as usual—walked busily up and down the center aisle, back and forth, escorting people to their seats and solemnly surveying the crowd—looking grieved, to be sure, but for all the world as though this were his day.)

"They took away all my designing responsibilities, all my privileges"—the star had a limousine for a while—"and they started questioning every lunch, every phone call. They were trying to drive me out. They put me in this office on the worst floor, down with the auditors and the secretarial pool, with no phone and no secretary, and they told my lawyer that I was expected to be there from nine to five. My hours were checked, and if I left early, they called my lawyer and said I was in breach of contract. I spent two months like that while my lawyer was trying to get me out of my contract with a settlement. The only project they gave me to do was a window for The House of Revlon, and I deliberately did terrible sketches. I did one which was three blow-ups of calendar pages, exploding, like, with wigs coming out of them. Terrible! We were at war."

Revlon wound up settling the balance of Schumacher's contract, as it settled so many other contracts of high-priced men who found themselves working down in that same Siberia, for something in excess of $50,000. And it's easy to see how, in this case at least, Revlon considered itself the victim and not the villain. Like many who spun through the revolving door, Schumacher got more out of the company than he put in.

But rather than try to apportion the blame for the extreme brevity of this marriage, Schumacher summarizes the syndrome:

"Nobody goes to work for Revlon unless he was a star before," he says. "Then Revlon overpays you, you get bought for so much money that it's an offer you can't refuse. Then you get there and you are the prisoner of your own greed and Revson is sitting there with those piercing eyes representing what you have done to yourself. Once he buys you, how can he respect you? And how could I respect him when I knew he had bought me and I didn't respect myself?"

Most of the stars Revlon hired were not quite so creative or far out as Joel Schumacher. There was Mort Green, brought in in the late fifties as the TV messiah, who wore green velvet suits (get it?) and who once danced a marengue on the conference-room table to illustrate his idea for el Flama Grande, the new Revlon shade. But by and large, the creative talent Revson wrung out and discarded was more in the Brooks Brothers/Madison Avenue mold.

One Wall Street analyst was working on a report titled, "Twelve Coming Executives at Revlon," to prove that the company had developed depth of management. Only two of the twelve were around by the time the man finally gave up in disgust. A purchasing post was filled six times in a single year. Suzanne Grayson, who later left Revlon to open The Face Factory (a Baskin-Robbins approach to lipstick), went to work at Revlon on a Thursday, and her boss was fired the following week. It happened all the time. Ad Age referred to it as "the grand march from Revlon."

(One face that remained the same in the annual reports all the way from 1966 to 1975 was Charles's own. From 1966 on, the same photo was used . . . cropped differently each year . . . and Charles did not look a day older to his shareholders in 1975 than he did in 1966.)

By the midsixties the turnover slowed, in part because Charles was directing some of his attention to other things, such as acquisitions. He acquired and then disposed of—hired and fired—almost as many companies as executives. And then there were Revlon presidents to court, marry, and divorce (three of them, between 1965 and 1971: George Murphy, Dan Rodgers, and Joe Anderer); hair stylists in the extravagant Revlon salon to get rid of; Lyn and the yacht and the triplex apartment to remodel, all at great expense; and international operations and the pharmaceutical company to oversee. It was only natural that Charles would have less of an impact on the nuts and the bolts of each ad and the hiring and firing of each middle manager.

Moreover, the brilliant-if-abrasive marketing whiz, Bill Mandel, had risen in the company to the point where he could stand up to Charles and, largely, keep him away from the rest of the troops.

(Mandel was one of the few who could make Charles laugh. He used to laugh at Mandel's jokes and then feel so embarrassed that he'd make a remark like, "Oh, you're always doing that sort of thing!" He'd laugh hysterically and then catch himself and say, "You've got to stop doing that." It was almost as if he felt guilty laughing or having a good time—as perhaps he did. Here they were talking about something as serious as the tag line for a new makeup -Charles wanted to call it "an ingenious potpourri of makeup coloring"—and Mandel blurts out, "If you keep that up, Charles, you won't have a pot left to pourri in." Mandel could get away with murder, Kay Daly says. After Mandel left the company—Charles, it seemed, had the last laugh—Stan Kohlenberg was one of those who could stand in as company comic. "I was kind of the village idiot sometimes because of the way I'd try to get some of the pressure off. I could get him to laugh. He wouldn't show me he was laughing, but he would put his hand over his face and sort of shake his head.")

Despite Revson's fearsome reputation for chewing people up, a lot of very talented men and women were attracted to the company over the years (women were restricted to creative posts). Revlon represented the challenge of the big leagues, and never hurt anyone's resume. What's more, you could actually form quite an affection and respect for this dynamic, single-minded, slightly insane, often infuriating, galloping egomaniac, even if he never did say thank you. His aloofness and never being satisfied enhanced his magnetism. "You got the feeling from him," Kay Daly said, "that no matter what you did, you were never going to please him. And this is something that is very interesting to women. Martin doesn't have that because he's too nice and too much of a good egg. But Charles had this edge . . ."

And then there was the money. Revson paid premium wages (coupled with lucrative stock options) because he could never have gotten top people to work with him, and to work those hours, if he had not. And once a man worth $25,000 anywhere else had gotten used to a $35,000 lifestyle, Revson owned him. He could abuse him all day long, and the man would take it because he couldn't afford to leave. "It was the most overpaid company in the business," asserts an alumnus, "and that was Revson's luxury for telling them anything he wanted."

Additionally, he would pay almost any price for what he wanted; never wanted to be thought of as cheap (least of all "a cheap Jew"); and lacked the patience to negotiate. When he wanted something, he wanted it now—and that costs money.

"If the job is right and the money is right," he asked one man who had left Revlon, "will you come back?"

"Well, I, uh --" stuttered the man, caught by the directness of the question.

"Not, 'Well, I, uh,' goddamn it -- yes or no?

"If the job is right and the money is right? Well, yes!"

"Okay, Jay," Charles said to Jay Bennett, who was sitting with them, "take care of it."

"What would it take to get you back," Bennett asked one such man. "Sixty? Seventy? Eighty?" To which the man replied, "Well, you just ruled out sixty and seventy."

In the days when Charles handled these things himself, he was an equally soft touch. In 1947, Charles was looking for "a publicity girl" and Bea Castle came recommended to him. "I asked him how much money I'd be making," she remembers, "and he named a figure. I had always worked by the week, and this was the yearly figure, and I was stunned. The figure he named was something like $10,000, which looked like a million to me. He saw my expression and quickly added $1,000 to it."

If $10,000 looked like a million dollars to Bea Castle in 1947, we can only wonder what $125,000 looked like to Kay Daly, in the fifties. Or what a million looked like to Bill Mandel in 1966, when Charles promised it to him out of his own pocket if his stock options did not earn him at least that much. (They did.) Or what two million looked like to Sol Levine, the brilliant, funny, effective head of Revlon plant operations, when, through a complicated deal, it was paid to him as a bonus for signing back on with Revlon in 1969. Or, finally, what a $3.1 million five-year contract looked like to Michel Bergerac when he was signed on as Charles's successor in 1974—plus, oh yes, a 70,000-share stock option worth another $2.8 million on paper less than a year later.

In a marketing business like Revlon or a research business like U.S.V., Revlon's pharmaceutical company, it pays to get the top creative talent, because what you are really selling, as opposed to raw materials or labor, is the product of a few good brains. But talent always seemed brighter outside the company. Once it was working for Revlon, it lost much of its mystique. So there was little advancement from within the ranks, and the salary increases were not nearly as lavish as that initial deal. And here was the catch: In order to get a big raise or a promotion, you generally had to threaten to leave for the competition (or actually do so and then be wooed back). But once you did that you were a marked man. Charles took that sort of thing personally. Your disloyalty to him and to Revlon would not be forgotten. Your salary would be raised, and the search would begin for your successor. He would get even with you and regain the dominant position in the relationship by paying enough to keep you—and then forcing you out. It was the old "You can't fire me; I quit" syndrome, in reverse. There were exceptions, but it was a familiar Revson pattern.

Charles was a demanding, often abusive employer, no question about it. He had this relentless intensity . . . like a man too excited by his ideas and his work to fall asleep as, in fact, Revson had difficulty doing. He would call Ray Stetzer at the lab every day without fail. And then he would call him at home on Sunday night. Sunday night conversations with Stetzer could run nonstop from seven-thirty to eleven—three and a half hours on the phone—because Charles had that many questions to ask, that many products to discuss, and that much stamina. And then Monday morning, as every other morning, the phone would ring up at the lab at ten o'clock, and Charles would be asking Ray what progress had been made on the things they had discussed the night before. Agh! He had tremendous patience—who else could spend three and a half hours on the phone in a sitting?—and tremendous, nagging impatience—who else would call the next morning to find out what had been done?

He even offered Stetzer two acres of his own property in Rye if he would only build a house there. It wasn't enough that he would call Stetzer at three or four in the morning from Tokyo (well, it wasn't three or four in Tokyo); or that once in the late forties he had the Royal Canadian Mounted Police track the Stetzers down in the midst of their vacation to have him rush back to the office; or that in 1952 a police gondola in Venice came out to get them in the middle of the Grand Canal for the same purpose. He wanted them to live next door.

That's putting it strongly, to be sure -- but what about all these charges of "owning" executives and "murdering" them and such? Someone once confronted Charles directly on these points:

Charles was dining at The Four Seasons with this man, whom he very much wanted to hire—the woo-ee, we'll call him. Now a top Revlon executive, the woo-ee was then quite comfortable and secure where he was, thank you, and so felt he had nothing to lose by being frank.

"Mr. Revson," he said, "I'm intrigued by what you're offering me, but—excuse me for being blunt—I hear you're a real shit. That you devour people, that you think you own them seven days a week . . . You've got a lousy reputation, and I really would like your response to that."

The thrust of Revson's answer was that he's honest, he's straight, and, yes, he is demanding. And he thinks he got his reputation because he is a perfectionist and he gets rid of people if they don't live up to his expectations. He said there are an awful lot of millionaires walking around the street today that he made millionaires, and you never hear from them. Which was true.

"But then," says the woo-ee, "he began rambling around the subject and—you know, he's always an hour late, and we didn't meet at The Four Seasons until ten. The restaurant closed at one, but he got up and tipped somebody to keep the place open—the kitchen and everything—and we must have sat there until at least three o'clock talking, and he was still answering that question. He's very defensive on it.

"Charles and I and his personnel man, Jay Bennett, are at one table; his wife Lyn and, I think, their friend Jerry Zipkin at another. And Charles says: 'Now, as to this thing about owning people, that's bullshit. I don't own my people. Why, I just hired a guy—fantastic, a real professional manager, just came in a few months ago. I don't follow him at all—I don't even know what he did last week. I don't own him. Jay, call Harry [not his real name] and have him get his ass on down here.'

"So Jay gets up and calls Harry, who lives out in Connecticut, and wakes him up. And he drives in, sleep in his eyes—it must be three A.M. by now—and Charles says, 'Kiddie, tell him I don't own you.'

"I broke up. I was thinking: 'You're not ruthless, you're crazy!' I think he saw the humor in the situation, but he didn't say anything."

They left the restaurant, finally, and walked over to one of Revson's favorite all-night drugstores. "This is where the hookers hang out," he told the woo-ee. "You learn a lot from what they buy."