After the first night, Charles, Martin, and Norman retreated to Charles's table at Billy Reid's Little Club, the first table on the right past the bar. Charles was morose. It was another goddamn dog, and he wanted out.

Of course, Charles was by nature morose. As he had said once in another context: "If it wasn't terrible, it wouldn't be my life." (The yacht he had chartered didn't have gold cutlery or modern stabilizers -- wasn't even air-conditioned! -- and that was his comment upon returning: "Well, if it wasn't terrible, it wouldn't be my life.") So he may not really have wanted to dump the show without giving it more of a try. But Norman and Martin had to stay up with him late into the night defending the show's potential. "I think he thought it was a long way from cosmetics and wasn't conducive to the emotional aura and surroundings in which he'd like to see his products," says Norman. He was proved wrong.

First aired June 7, 1955, within four weeks The $64,000 Question was number one in the ratings. Some of the products featured on the show were experiencing 300 percent and 500 percent sales increases. One lipstick shade sold out in ten days. What was advertised on Tuesday night was sold out Wednesday morning. "We could have sold urine in a bag," admits Jay Bennett.

Charles was not about to sell urine in a bag, however. Or even, for that matter, perfectly good powder in Love Pat compacts. He had a roomful of back orders for those compacts, but held up production for months until Sol Levine could devise techniques to make the tortoiseshell look more nearly real and to make the gold stamping on the compact even more impervious to wear. Levine was running around the country like mad, commandeering plants in what was almost a war effort to meet demand and to launch a dozen new products (Living Lipstick, Satin Set hairspray, Futurama lipstick cases, Silicare medicated lotion, Clean & Clear, Sun Bath, and more) ... and at the same time Charles refused to cut even the most trivial corners.

On an average Tuesday night at ten, nearly twice as many people -- 55,000,000 -- were watching Revlon's ads as had watched Nixon's "Checkers" speech. At its peak an unbelievable 82 percent of the television sets switched on around the country were tuned to emcee Hal March, the famous "isolation booth," Revlon spokeswoman Barbara Britton, and the latest Revlon promotion. Movie theaters complained of sparse attendance on Tuesday nights. Restaurant business was off.

The ten-thirty to eleven time slot following The $64,000 Question suddenly became very valuable. General Motors won out in the bidding for it, and Edward R. Murrow's See It Now, which had occupied the time, was forced to move to make way for a more commercial show. Imagine -- General Motors bidding to capitalize on Charlie Revson's success! It would have swelled his chest with pride . . . if only he could have taken credit for having discovered, or at least not bad-mouthed, the show. Instead, it rankled him -- which may have been the underlying reason for his dumping Norman, Craig & Kummel in 1956, despite the fact that Revlon's sales and profits were exploding as a direct result of NC&K's having brought in The $64,000 Question. (Dumping the agency at such a time did little for the Revson reputation on Madison Avenue.)

Soon Revlon had captured Sunday night audiences with a spin-off, The $64,000 Challenge. And in an effort to make it a triple sweep -- Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday -- it was announced that The Most Beautiful Girl in the World would debut at 9 Eastern Daylight Time, October 22, 1956. The show was to be a sort of weekly Miss America pageant, with $250,000 thrown in as top prize to keep the contestants smiling. Revson set as criteria for contestants that they be beautiful, talented, and intelligent. After screening hundreds of potential contestants, the last of a string of producers assigned to create a pilot went to Charles: "Would you say Judy Garland is talented?" Of course. "Intelligent?'' Yeah. "Beautiful?" No. He then proposed Hedy Lamarr, whom Charles faulted on a different count. "Well," concluded the producer, "how do you expect us to come up with three contestants a week if Judy Garland and Hedy Lamarr wouldn't qualify?" The show never made it to the air.

It may be argued that The $64,000 Question was the difference between Revson's becoming just another successful businessman and his becoming a superstar. Up until this time, Revlon had risen to the level of its competitors, but did not dominate the field, except in nail polish. It had to fight costly battles with competitors. It did not have huge advantages of scale. Profits were modest. The company was not home free. There was no IBM-versus-everybody-else relationship here.

The Question raised Revlon sales, profits, and consumer awareness so dramatically as to put it miles ahead of its competitors. And that sort of edge tends to be self-perpetuating, or even self-expanding. The rich get richer. The companies with the most resources, other things being equal (not better, just equal), can swamp the competition.

Sales, which had been growing at from 10 to 20 percent a year in the first half of the fifties, suddenly shot up 54 percent in 1955 -- even though The Question was only on the air for the second half of the year. Profits tripled. It was a fine way to kick off Revlon's public stock offering.

The next year, sales were up yet another 66 percent, to $85 million, and profits better than doubled. The pretax profit on every sales dollar had widened from eight cents in 1954 to twenty cents. Helena Rubinstein, Max Factor, Coty, and Hazel Bishop, which had all been at least within striking distance of Revlon before The Question went on the air, were left bitterly in the dust. Revlon was number one in lipstick, number one in hair spray, number one in nail products, and number one in makeup. The chairman of Hazel Bishop had to report a surprising $460,000 loss for 1955, "due to circumstances beyond our control," as he put it. Hazel Bishop had been swamped by Revlon.

By 1957, a spate of competitive quiz shows, most notably Twenty-One, with its Charles Van Doren, had begun to cut into The Question craze, and Revlon found itself doing things like upping the top prize money from $64,000 to $256,000. (Ten-year-old Robert Strom, who had just collected $64,000 for his store of scientific knowledge, was given the first crack at the extra prize money and took home $192,000.) And a year later quiz shows had become old hat -- the subject of a budding national scandal. The $64,000 Question was quietly folded, But not before it had lifted Revlon sales by about $64,000,000.

But it was better than that. The Godfather dragged on for hours, with countless sponsors, one after another. People were riveted to The $64,000 Question, for which there was only one sponsor. Identification of Revlon with The Question was very close; Charles himself appeared to present the first $64,000 check (to a U.S. marine who knew all about food). The commercials were all done live. The studio audience oohed and aahed at Revlon's extravaganzas just as they sat in tense silence during the show's most suspenseful moments. Barbara Britton was almost as much a part of the show as Hal March. The electricity was shared. Constant national publicity mentioned Revlon again and again.

Doing the commercials live had a number of advantages, not least of which was that it allowed Revlon to steal television time. Each of Revlon's three commercials per show was supposed to run one minute. Few, if any, ran less, and a great many ran longer. Says a key figure from that period, still with Revlon: "We would run 'sixty-second' commercials for three minutes and there was nothing they could do to stop us because we were live. What were they going to do? Run to the middle of the stage and yell, 'Stop!'? So there were times when we were literally running three-minute one-minute commercials, I think we ran over three minutes once."

CBS naturally screamed its head off -- but only so loud. This was a very hot property they had, and they didn't want to see it moved to NBC. That network had quickly tried to lure the show away, offering, it was widely reported, $2 million of free midday commercial time. Revlon ultimately decided to stick with CBS, but not before Variety had summed up the battle as "the most extravagant power play in TV's annals." Agencies and sponsors, Variety wrote, "are even yet salving wounded feelings as they recapitulate the most fantastic crisscross pattern and chain reaction of events that transcends anything that vets in. the business can recall.'" As Daniel Seligman concluded his profile of Revlon in the April 1956 Fortune -- even before the quiz scandal erupted or Martin sued Charles -- "The company is what might be called controversy-prone. It will bear plenty of watching."

Another reason Charles insisted on live commercials (which were not unusual in those days) was the flexibility it gave him in deciding almost up to the last minute what to pitch and how. He could drive everybody crazy, and did.

"All during The $64,000 Question and The Challenge," a veteran of these wars remembers, "he would never start a script until maybe a week before air, which made life impossible. You would get approval -- alleged approval -- generally no more than forty-eight hours before air. You'd be at rehearsal at six o'clock for the first run-through. Mandel would walk in with a long face. 'Bad news.' 'What's the matter?' 'Charles hates it.' (I asked Mandel whether there were any commercials Charles particularly loved or hated. "He hated them all," Mandel said.) Then you'd rewrite, starting at six-thirty, seven o'clock, and you'd have a whole [tele-] prompter crew there to redo the prompter. Go and dress at nine; on the air at ten. Charles felt there was greater spontaneity by doing that.

"Each one of these things was like a little Broadway production. The first one I did, I remember we had dry-ice fog and willow trees and slaves all over the floor. We did three live commercials a week on each of three different shows. We broke every union rule in the book. They just learned to accept it because if we had had their people doing it, we would have killed them. So they let us kill ourselves, instead. The guy who made it work, in my opinion, was our crazy art director, Ben Colarossi."

Colarossi talks of the difficulty of running ads for color promotions in black and white. You had to be dramatic, he says, to create an image. Plumes, smoke bombs, waterfalls, flaming goblets -- all live. You also had to be nimble to satisfy Revlon's last-minute changes of heart. New supers -- black cards with white lettering that would be superimposed on the screen -would be ordered up minutes before air time, and there was no way, according to union procedure, they could be done in time. Colarossi would dash downstairs to the men's room, lock himself in a booth so the union couldn't see him, sit down, dip his brush into the bowl between his knees, and letter the new super.

A lot went on in that men's room, actually. One evening the producer from the ad agency showed up in work clothes. Charles had made it clear that anyone associated with Revlon was to dress properly, but Charles almost never came to rehearsals. In comes The Black Specter. Black overcoat, silver tie, neat black pants, black shoes. The producer took one look at him and ran for the men's room. They had to run a monitor down there, and a phone. And he stayed down there until nearly eleven o'clock -- Charles didn't leave that night until after the show.

A lot had to go right when you were doing live commercials, and it generally did. Barbara Britton couldn't come down with the flu or get stuck in traffic. The jewel lady had to show up each night without getting mugged. This Ruth Buzzi-like lady would ferry maybe $100,000 worth of jewels to and from VanCleef & Arpels in her handbag each night for Revlon's models to wear. No one would have guessed from her appearance what she was carrying.

Of course, you couldn't expect everything to go smoothly on a live show. The gaze of millions of viewers suddenly panned up in an arc one night, from the isolation booth to the rafters. Some nut had walked in off the street and knifed – killed -- the first man who caught his eye, a CBS cameraman. On another evening, a Hungarian freedom fighter walked out on stage with Hal March. "I really want to thank you for coming tonight, sir," March said, putting his arm around the man's shoulders. "Come over here and let me put you on the other camera." Whereupon he was grabbed from the wings.

Miraculously, nothing so dramatic went wrong with any of Revlon's productions. Models were given few lines to say, so there was little they could flub. One model was charged with looking up indignantly at the camera and saying -- "Soap on my face? Never!" -- in connection with an ad for Clean & Clear. This very sexy model studied and studied her line, and when the great moment came she looked up indignantly at America and said, "Face on my soap? Never!"

And of course there were the ducks. The idea was to have a baby duckling swim over to a model, who would pick it up and cuddle it by her cheek. An ad for Love Pat. Chateau Theatrical Animals, Inc., was engaged to provide a dozen baby ducklings and a duck handler. You had to have a lot of back-up ducklings because they have a tendency to doze off. Anyway, the moment comes and the ducklings swim the wrong way, off camera. If they had known Charles Revson, they would never have dared do it, but they didn't, and they did. Bill Mandel, hysterical in the control booth, is yelling, "Cue the ducks! Cue the ducks!" Eventually the model managed to grab one and finish the commercial, but it was not Revlon's finest hour.

Says one agency man connected with the show: "The next day was a bad day at Revlon. Charles very seldom said something to us about anything he didn't like. You'd go in and he'd just sit there and shake his head. He'd summon fourteen people into the conference room and just sit there for ten minutes with his head in his hands, staring, without saying a word. I went to two meetings where that's all there was. He'd just sit there and stare around the room, and you could just feel the hate. He'd give it to you, then the next guy, then the next, and then he'd say: 'Shit.' And walk out." There were gargoyles under the lighting fixtures all around the conference room at 666 Fifth Avenue; at times like this they all looked like Charles.

Working on the Revlon account was like riding in a rodeo. It was a challenge, you could win some money, and the ride generally ended fairly quickly anyway. From 1944 to 1957 Revlon used nine separate ad agencies. "Revlon's then small $600,000 account," Time reported, "was first snagged by McCann-Erickson's John McCarthy -- who lasted a stormy six months with Revson. The two men finally fell out over McCarthy's dirty fingernails. When Revson needled him, McCarthy snapped: 'What do you want me to do, use nail polish?' Revson laughed -- and ordered McCarthy thrown off the account." Reportedly, sixteen or seventeen other top account men followed McCarthy until, in 1948, the account moved to the William Weintraub agency. There it was handled by Norman B. Norman, who later formed Norman, Craig & Kummel. Norman managed to work with Charles for seven years. He, too, was a "street fighter" not universally loved. He drove a white Silver Cloud with NBN plates, dressed like Charles, acted like Charles, and came from much the same mold. He was, however, taller, more articulate, and able to work for someone else, which Charles would undoubtedly have found extraordinarily difficult. After seven years he was canned.

Norman attributed his downfall to George Abrams, a Revlon V.P. he felt was out to get him -- and on whom, accordingly, he placed a private detective. Norman, as I say, was a street fighter. Maybe he got the idea from Mickey Soroko. Or maybe he was inspired by the Revlon wiretapping revelations that had been made not long before, and to which we will return in a subsequent chapter. In any case, despite the detective, Abrams stayed on and Norman was out. The specific cause, Norman told the press, was a fight over Revlon's failure to pay agency commissions that were due. Revlon attributed it, rather, to "neglect of service." Martin told Time: "Norman is just a mere infant, that's all. He should shut up." Norman managed to get in a quote about having had to put out the Fire and Ice promotion over Charles's dead body, "even though it was the best ad he ever had." (A statement totally at odds with Kay Daly's recollection, recounted earlier.) Like many a Revson controversy, this one sheds little light on what actually happened, but a good bit on the atmosphere that surrounded the man and his company. Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn inherited the Revlon account from Norman, Craig & Kummel -- and lost it the following year.

George Abrams, the advertising V.P. Norman paid to have investigated, was propped up at Revlon by Mandel, whom he had brought over from his former company, Block Drug, as his assistant. After a while, Mandel decided to let George fend for himself, and that was the end of George. Of course, Abrams doesn't see it that way. A tireless and widely disregarded self-promoter, who credits himself with, among much else, the invention of the chocolate chip cookie, he confides that "Mandel turned out to be a barracuda of the worst kind." Abrams was not alone in this opinion, but Mandel says that he "only killed when attacked." And Mandel was so shocked by the stories he found out George had been telling Charles -- stories that far exceeded for venom and malice the bounds of even Revlon office politics, he said -- that he made me turn off my tape recorder even to tell me that he wouldn't tell me what they were.

Abrams left Revlon and Mandel quickly became the most important man in the company after Charles. (For a fuller account of George Abrams's brilliance, read How I Made a Million Dollars With Ideas, by George Abrams. Playboy Press, 1972. ) It was Mandel, largely, who presented the marketing side of Revlon to Wall Street security analysts; Mandel who developed much of the theming for Revlon campaigns; Mandel who would battle with Charles over the proper positioning of new products and the proper strategy for the company as a whole. He filled the gap left by Martin Revson's departure, and he served as the interface between Charles and the rest of the marketing and agency people. He would take their work and sell it to Charles. The underlying logic of this arrangement was simply that in a group Charles would bully people, whereas one-on-one he was not bad. He was reasonable. The agency, Grey Advertising this time, managed to steer clear of Revson for so long – years -- that one day Charles looked up, as if struck by a sudden thought, and asked Mandel: "Where's Grey?" Structured this way, Grey has managed to keep the account for seventeen years.

Similarly, Mandel never showed Charles TV advertising in advance -- "because we would never have gotten it on the air." Charles had mixed feelings about TV commercials, anyway, even though they had contributed so directly to his success. When he once asked to see a review of all the advertising that had been done in the prior six months -- "everything" -- Kay Daly, Mandel, and Sandy Buchsbaum organized it and decided to start with the most recent commercials. Charles arrived, impatient as always -- "Come on, come on" -- and they started to run the commercials. Charles said: "I didn't want to see television, I told you I wanted to see advertising."

Print would hold still and he could perfect it. It was a permanent statement. A TV commercial, good or bad, evaporated. It was more important to him to get the ad for the Sunday Times perfect, even if it reached fewer people, because (a) they were the people he cared about; and (b) an imperfection would not evaporate -- it would just sit there and embarrass him.

There's hardly a veteran ad man in New York who hasn't had some kind of contact with Revlon. What follows are the impressions of just one advertising man who worked on the account through the quiz show years and on into the early sixties.

When I first went to work on the Revlon account they were in the Squibb Building. Then they went to 666 Fifth Avenue. ["Sick-sick-sick," as Revlon executives used to refer to their madhouse.] Charles despised 666. He leased the space before it was finished, and when he looked at it, he threw a tantrum. The building has metal bumps up and down the sides, like pimples. He tried to have them redo the side of the building. He also hated the elevators, which were too slow.

I first met him when Mandel took me in to show him a carbro -- a very expensive type of proof they don't have anymore. He looked at the art and he didn't like the eyes and he picked up a ballpoint pen and he's about to destroy . . . I just couldn't stand to see him do it, so I grabbed the pen. And his hand went down empty and he turned around and his eyes are cutting me to shreds. I handed him the pen like a waiter, across my left forearm, and I said: "Mr. Revson, I just saved you ten thousand dollars. Would you mind making your corrections in the margin?" Which he did, but he didn't say another word to me. As I went out the door, he says to Mandel.' "Who's the clown with the moustache?" Mandel told him. He said: "Keep him around, he's got balls." That's an insight into Charles. The only thing he respected was spunk.

The second time I went to see him, I was wearing a brown Glen plaid suit, perfectly matched. He said: "Kiddie, you know what brown's the color of? Get out." I had to dress like a Mafia member from then on. Gray was as flamboyant as he would go.

He had a miraculous hand lotion called Silicate. Fantastic. It was discovered during the First World War, for its healing powers. But he was never able to decide whether it was a drug or a cosmetic. The minute he would lean towards cosmetic, you'd come in with a campaign and he'd scream that you hadn't captured the healing powers, and vice versa. One of the account men had the disastrously bad taste to tell him that the problem with Silicare was that it looked like mucous. He was taken off the account that afternoon.

Charles never innovated anything but color. He stole everything. He had a lab up in the Bronx with a spectroscope that would make the CIA jealous. [A roomful of them, in fact: an infrared spectrophotometer, an ultraviolet spectrophotometer, an atomic absorption spectrophotometer, and a thin-layer chromotography plate-reader, for starters. Also, on other floors: a guillotine-like "bottle drop," used to drop bottles to see if they break; a spice rack-like perfumery, with vials of such ingredients as Bulgarian Rose Otto, at $4,000 the pound; and a rabbit/rodent ranch where the rabbits, the day I saw them, wore mascara, and the rats were being force-fed Head & Shoulders, a Proctor & Gamble product, to see how much it would take to kill them. (One more reason to be a rabbit and not a rat.)] And what he did was to wait until some small innovator would come out with something . . . he had a fantastic intelligence network . . . and if it was moving, zap -- up to the lab, analyzed, copied, and out on the market with packaging and advertising before the little guy knew what had happened.

There was a small French outfit that came in with a multiplicity of pastel colors, not just one. It was moving like hell, so we put together a shade promotion called Colors Unlimited and it was out within six weeks.

Eterna 27 was a weirdie. [One important product Revlon did innovate was Eterna 27.] We were going to launch it on The Ed Sullivan Show with a ninety-second commercial. Whereupon word is sent over from Sullivan that he will not do the commercial until it was proved to him that the claims for the product were true. Sullivan didn't like Revson and, in truth, Sullivan was a very anti-Semitic guy. So they send me [a Gentile] over to sell Sullivan. Charles gives me more books than I can carry with clinical data on Eterna 27. The tests were done at a women's prison, ending up with one side of the woman's face looking great and the other side looking awful. The tests were overwhelming. I walked in to see Sullivan and sat and sat. The great man was busy. Finally he gets through taping and I'm taken into his dressing room and I start showing him the materials. He turns around and grabs me by the arm and says: "I've got one question. Does this stuff work on guys?" I said: "Ed, honestly I don't know." I went back and Charles said, yes, it would. Sullivan had a case sent over that afternoon and went ahead with the commercial.

I wrote Revson's speech for a UJA appeal. I did a lot of research on it and I really did write a heartbreaking speech about the kid with the rifle going hands and knees across the field at the Gaza Strip and can you let him do it all? This kind of thing. Charles didn't rehearse the speech and he blew it badly. He was so mad when he got off the podium, he comes down and he's walking past a table, and there's a very well-dressed woman there, with a beautiful silver fox stole . . . I don't think he even knew this woman . . . but as he walked by her table he snatched the stole off her back and threw it on the floor and said: "Fox is for whores." She looked at him incredulously, she started to cry . . . and he stormed out of the room. He has a list of things that offend him and fox is one of them, just like brown suits. [Mandel confirms Charles's hatred of fox, but doubts Charles could have acted as described.]

I went to a stockholders' meeting. Five seats in front of me was a little guy with a stack of law books with place marks in them. And he finally gets up and says: "I have some questions." And he starts quoting Business Law and all kinds of jazz. He goes on and on but he's really well-informed and his complaints are exceedingly specific.

All of a sudden this Valkyrie comes screaming down from the back of the room . . . it's Ancky. She can't get to him because he's in about four seats from the aisle and she's screaming at the top of her lungs -- "What have you ever given to this company? What have you ever done? I have given it my husband. I have given it my life. My children have no father so he should run the company right. You stand there with your books . . . I'll buy your stock right now at ten dollars over market." She opens her bag and is waving this money around, and they had to take her out. Charles is up there on the podium, dying.

[Even under ordinary circumstances, Charles found stockholders' meetings trying:

"I'm Mrs. Shapiro. Will you please tell me one thing? You have painted a wonderful picture for us. But when I bought your Revlon it was at eighty-six, now it's thirty-eight and you're doing wonderfully. Where are the profits? You're such a big company and you can't afford to give anything more?" (In past years a package of Revlon products had been given to each attendee.) "Why shouldn't we get a little something more? You don't serve anything here and there are no microphones and . . . Well, this is the dullest meeting I ever attended. I go to Pfizer and a lot of others, and I certainly get much more. At least if I lose with them, I enjoy losing."

"Madam," Revson began his reply, "sometimes you talk as though you were a competitor." But it was true: Revlon had cut out giving away free cosmetics at its annual meetings to discourage women from coming, and had purposely neglected to provide microphones to put a damper on the question-and-answer period. Thank God these things happened only once a year.]

Charles's office looked like the lobby of a French bordello. His main executive office was exceedingly masculine . . . paneling and all that, dark wood desk. But he spent a great deal of time in a series of rooms that ran down from his office, off of which were other executive offices and a sort of showroom. It was all very pastelly, French-bordello.

George Beck was one of Charles's personal aides. An ex-navy pilot, aide to Admiral Halsey, and a big ladies' man. And there was an account man at Grey, a very nice guy, who was running around with one of Charles's girls. Only this guy didn't know she was Charles's girl friend when he started seeing her. So George Beck arrives at his apartment one night and he says: "David, are you in good health?" He says: "As far as I know." Beck says: "It could be very temporary." David says: "What do you mean?" Beck says: "If you ever see whatever-her-name-was again, it would be bad health. If you see her twice, you probably won't survive." He took Beck seriously; he never saw her again. He told me this himself. [In an unrelated incident, Beck and his fifth wife were found murdered on board a houseboat anchored off Ft. Lauderdale, in 1971.]