The only thing Charles Revson took more seriously than his business was his health. Compulsive about his products, he was an out-and-out nut about his health. "He swallowed every fucking pill in the world," says Irving Botwin. "The guy was a walking drugstore." His doctor objects to use of the term "hypochondriac," on the grounds that any man who has survived two heart attacks has reason for concern. But the intensity of his concern far exceeded the severity of his attacks. They were so mild his ex-wife doesn't even believe he ever had them.

He had a variety of digestive complaints throughout his life, including at one time a small ulcer; and also a variety of attempted cures, many of them self-devised. In the early forties he went on a baby-food diet. Around the same time, he consumed great quantities of halvah. At Billy Reid's Little Club he would order Bumble Bee salmon and baked beans (neither was on the menu); and if the beans were not kept properly separate from the salmon, he would send the plate back to the kitchen to be rearranged. He didn't want salmon juice mixing with his beans, For many years he would pour a gloopy white liquid into a glass of water before every meal and gobble a fistful of antacid pills after, leaving the corners of his mouth chalky white. It was for his stomach, also, that he gave up hard liquor.

And it was for his heart that he gave up everything else. "He never had any heart attack," scoffs Ancky, who was married to him when both were alleged to have occurred. "He had two," says Dr. Steiner, much of whose livelihood lo these thirty-six years was derived from Revson and Revlon. Katie Lowery, attempting to reconcile these seemingly contradictory views, suggests Charles may have talked Steiner into agreeing that his minor heart problems were "attacks." After all, beyond a point what purpose is served by arguing with your patient? Particularly when he has you on retainer and is helping to fund your research. If he wants to exaggerate his brush with death, why aggravate him by insisting on a less dramatic interpretation?

It is fair to conclude that Charles had at least two mild cardiac episodes -- call them what you will; that one occurred in late 1955, so as to land him in the hospital the day his stock went public and to require a longer than usual stay in Arthur Godfrey's suite at the Kenilworth Hotel in Miami to recuperate; that at the same time as he may have been exaggerating their importance in his own mind, he was simultaneously doing his best to conceal them from the public; and that mild as they may have been, they scared the shit out of him.

Accordingly, he brought extraordinary self-discipline to the task of caring for his heart. To begin with, he gave up smoking. The three to five packs of Phillip Morris regulars he smoked each day were cut, immediately, to nil. Cigars were likewise discarded. To ease his withdrawal he placed jars of hard candy all over his office. And from time to time he would dangle an unlit cigarillo from his lips. Naturally, the uninformed were forever lunging to light it and had constantly to be fought off.

Having achieved such remarkable reform in his own life, he ever after attempted to reform everyone else. He offered Ancky ten dollars for each of her normal twenty cigarettes she didn't smoke. The first day she didn't smoke at all and got her $200. The next day, $180. "And before you know it," she recalls, cigarette in hand, "I smoke just as much as before. I tried to stop, but I just couldn't." He offered Jack Friedman, his close friend in later years, $10,000 to quit, with no better success.

On instructions from Dr. Steiner, he also swore off cholesterol. These days such a diet (less stringently observed) has gained wide acceptance. In those days people thought he was crazy. Always a picky eater, he now became impossible. He shunned eggs and dairy products, of course, and was buying margarine in the days when it was still sold in tins at the drugstore. He developed the habit of running his finger over his steak and his vegetables and then sniffing it to be sure the chef or hostess had followed his butter-free instructions. He would seat himself, when possible, with a view of the kitchen to watch his food being prepared. It would be ridiculous to suggest that he thought people were trying to poison him -- but neither did he trust them. Even at home he would suspect that contraband had been slipped into a particular dish.

He would pull up to Les Ambassadeurs, in London, in a chauffeur-driven Rolls, carrying a bottle of corn oil in a paper bag. And then call the chef out to instruct him on its use. He would leave frantic messages for a vice president who was joining him abroad -- "Call Mr. Revson immediately." When the vice president called, he would ask, "Kiddie, you got the marge in the fridge?" He wanted to be sure the man had remembered to bring his margarine. On flights abroad he sometimes carried a soft athletic bag with two of his specially trimmed steaks and two bottles of Dom Perignon, to be sure of truly first-class treatment. In his last year on earth he had his meals chauffeured all the way up to the hospital in the Bronx from his apartment on Sixty-fifth Street. (One can never be too careful of that rich, spicy hospital food.)

His steaks had to be broiled from the top only, to let the fat run off, and they had to be charred dry. "He was not an adventurer in food," Irving Botwin admits. "Never. He ate enough tuna fish [packed in water; opened in front of him, like wine, so he could check the label] to start his own tuna factory. He loved meat loaf, steak . . ."

And yet in a way he was an adventurer -- adhering to an untested diet and devising his own cholesterol-free recipes. Stuart Levin, former owner of Pavilion, credits him with "some marvelous ideas in cooking-really terrific." He would have breast of chicken with the skin and all the fat removed, dipped in beaten egg whites and then fresh breadcrumbs and sautéed in Mazola corn oil. "It just never occurred to me to do it that way," Levin says, "and it was delicious!" Nothing was ever sent back to the kitchen, he explained, because both he and the chefs knew exactly how their "cherished client" -- Levin's phrase -- wanted things. Few restaurateurs were so talented or fortunate.

Much of the Revson legend, in fact, stems from quirks in the way he took care of himself. One could paint quite a sad picture of a man with grave health problems whom others unfeelingly ridiculed. Imagine his embarrassment at having to ask for special treatment in a restaurant! At having to have a special plate at a party! Except his health problems weren't grave; and if he felt embarrassment over his special requirements, he never showed it. Nor were they truly necessary. He feared cholesterol as the Wicked Witch of the West feared water, but without the justification. He acted as though a pat of butter would cripple him, and a second pat do him in. "He thought," says an executive at U.S.V. Pharmaceutical, "that if his cholesterol count could be reduced to zero he would live forever. Of course, if your cholesterol count is zero you're dead."

As a result of his regimen, Revson's cholesterol level declined from around 300, the upper limit of normality among American males (and considered by many doctors to be substantially too high), to under 200. To be on the safe side, however, he would frequently take his own pulse; he kept electrocardiographs in the city, the country, and on his yacht; he had electrocardiograms taken daily when he traveled (a doctor was always aboard the yacht); and to remain fit, he exercised six mornings a week for twenty years with his private trainer/masseur/chiropractor, Dr. Mac -- a Jewish ex-fight-trainer and semipro football player from Rumania.

His exercise room at 625 Park Avenue was small but elegant, with naked Greeks cavorting on red wallpaper. Dr. Mac would in later years arrive from Levittown every morning a little past nine. Charles was usually on the phone by then or, occasionally, asleep. A quick shower was followed by ten or fifteen minutes on the Mr. Jogger Cadette, twenty or thirty minutes on the electric bike, a minute or two under the sun lamp, and twenty minutes of exercise with tension cables. Mac was careful not to have Charles work up a heavy sweat. "But sometimes he'd give a sneeze or two and say, 'Gee, I think I'm catching a cold.' And I'd say, 'You don't have a cold.' And he'd say, 'Well, I'll go and see Dr. Steiner anyway.' Each time I'd bet him a dime he didn't have a cold -- and I won myself quite a pile of dimes."

After the exercises, a massage. Not like one sees in the movies, but a gentle rubbing/kneading "treatment." Then he would shower or bathe and pick out one of his hundred or so Fioravanti suits that all looked the same, anyway (so much so that the butler had to number them to be sure which jacket went with which trousers), and have breakfast. Saturdays, this routine would be conducted up in the country. Sundays, Mac's day off, Charles would go through it alone.

Mac says that when he first met Charles, "he was a very stiff man." (In his demeanor, that is, not his musculature.) Gradually, he loosened up. "I kept horsing around and kidding with him, and little by little he'd smile. He liked to hear a little joke, and I'd tell him one almost every day." Pressed for an example, Mac tells the good news/bad news doctor checkup joke. (The good news is that the patient's peter is going to grow six inches longer; the bad news is it's malignant.)

Once at work there was another routine. "Charles had the most routinized life of any man I've ever met," says a man who got a call from him every Sunday night in the middle of Mission: Impossible.

He paced himself. His anger, for example, was always controlled. He would never leap out of his chair and start shouting. He would uncoil himself slowly, like a rattler, if he rose from his seat at all. There would be a slight tremble to his lower lip, which could curl up over his upper lip. His eyes drilled you. And if he was really furious, a little foam might show through his lips. But that's all. Never any quick or violent movement.

During his daily marathon lunch meeting, he would rest his head in his hands or on the table. He had the habit, too, of closing his eyes -- you could never tell whether he was with you or not. But the sleepy look was deceptive. Watch out.

After the marathon lunch, a nap. Years ago they were working on lipstick cabinets. The supplier was there and the buyer, and they were all fighting like mad. All of a sudden Charles goes over to the side of the room, stretches out on the sofa, and says: "Wake me up in half an hour. I'm going to sleep now."

By five or six in the afternoon he would be just beginning to catch his stride. His creative people, who arrived earlier and took no naps, were beginning to flag. Meetings would last another couple of hours, after which he would walk the few blocks to his apartment, shower, take another nap, dine, and around half past ten he would be ready, at last, for the meat of the day, the things he really wanted to do. "I had some fascinating evenings with him," one former associate says, "but they would most of the time run well past midnight. Charles was really a very lonely person who wanted company, and I guess the night was the loneliest period. He found it difficult to sleep. He was very much a night person."

He was concerned with his skin. He used Eterna 27, his wondrous wrinkle remover, every night. (He also ordered the tip of his nose and the tips of his "devil's ears" airbrushed out of all photos.) He would "collect" his blackheads, and the bumps that come with old age, and every couple of months have Revlon's staff dermatologist remove them. "I would send all my tools down to his office by messenger," says Dr. Brauer, "and then at the end of the day, when everyone had left, he would show me the areas and I would remove them. He was aware of every square inch of his body, including his back."

For all this (and I have spared you his ophthalmologist, his throat specialist, and whoever else) -- for all this the man was hardly sick, really sick, a day in his life. He almost never missed a day's work. Which proves either that his elaborate self-attentiveness paid off or that it was unnecessary.

People talk of Revson's inviting them up to his home in Premium Point during the Lyn era for his famous Saturday night double-feature movies (the perfect nonsocial social evening), during which the butler would serve popcorn in a golden bowl and Charles would berate his guests for eating it.

"Where are you going, Mildred?" he asked pointedly of Mildred Custin, past president of Bonwit Teller, from across the room at one of his informal dinners. He was in the midst of another conversation, but he never missed a thing. He could see where she was headed. "I'm going to take another piece of angel-food cake," Mildred admitted. "Take the fruit, Mildred -- the fruit."

At a large and serious marketing meeting, Charles suddenly broke off in midsentence. "Stop eating those cookies!" he ordered vice president John Revson. "You've been eating them all day and that's enough, already. Joey," he said to another young whiz, Joe Spellman, "take those cookies away from Johnny and don't let him have any more." And then he finished his sentence.

At a lunch in his suite at Claridge's -- the Royal Suite -- he ordered cold chicken for everyone, minus any kind of dressing. When they had finished, the maitre d' popped his head in: "Sir, would you care for some cheese? .... Okay," Charles asks, "who's stupid enough to have some cheese?"

He loved to diagnose the conditions of those around him and to prescribe cures. For a layman, he knew a great deal about medicine. He was forever arranging for people to see Dr. Steiner, or to be treated by prominent specialists whom they would otherwise have had to wait months to get in to see. (Dr. Wilbur Gould, who treats all the opera stars for throat problems, Dr. James Nicholas, who handles Joe Namath, for bones, etc.) He often paid the bills himself.

"What are you eating eggs for?" Charles once asked Eli Tarplin, alarmed. (In his mind, eggs and death walked hand in hand.) "I went to the doctor and he thinks I have an ulcer," Tarplin replied. Charles stops the meeting and calls Dr. Steiner. "Al," he says, "Eli Tarplin is here with me and I think they're killing him. Okay. Good-bye." He tells Tarplin to meet Steiner at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital at two o'clock. (The hospital fed Tarplin milk and eggs for a week and the incipient ulcer disappeared.)

This was the one area -- people's health -- where he couldn't possibly have been more considerate. It was almost as if he had found in this hobby an acceptable outlet for his otherwise repressed warmth, a way of saying, "See, I'm not such a bad guy; when it comes to something really important, I'm the nicest guy in the world." Or it may have been his need to control people or, as with paying huge salaries, his way of making them feel forever beholden to him. No doubt it was also in part an extension of his own hypochondria. But the fact remains that Charles Revson did wonderful things for people around him who were injured or sick.

Suzanne Grayson's nine-year-old daughter was hit in the head by a golf ball, fracturing her skull in three places. Charles immediately arranged to have the head of neurosurgery at Lenox Hill Hospital break up his July 4 weekend to drive out to the rural Pennsylvania hospital.

Jerome Zipkin, full-time social person and walking laugh-riot, says if Charles hadn't gotten him down to Dr. Gould when he did, a tumor that was forming would have killed him.

Not to mention all the lives Revson saved indirectly. Myron Blumenfeld, Bloomingdale's cosmetics buyer, first met Revson in a hotel elevator after a Revlon sales presentation. "You work for me, don't you, young man?" Charles asked. "Thank God I don't," Blumenfeld replied. Some years later, he had a kidney disorder and, for the first time in his life, had to go into the hospital. "As I was going in," he says, "I looked up and saw that I was entering the Revson Diagnostic Center of the Albert Einstein College Hospital -- that it had been given by him. I remember writing a thank-you note."

Stanley Kohlenberg, on the other hand, was suffering from no more than a mole on his forehead when he met Revson for the first time, newly recruited as marketing director of the Ultima line. (He subsequently left to become president of Coty, and was then lured back to Revlon.)

"The first time, in 1968," he says, "I had never met Charles, but had heard about him, and I was obviously afraid of him, as most people are when they first meet him. I was here two weeks, in the product-training class downstairs [through which all executives go], and I get a call: 'You have to attend a Charles meeting as an observer because it's a meeting on your line and we want you there. All you do is go to the room, be very quiet, and leave when everybody else leaves. That's all we want. Nobody is going to ask you any questions, because you're brand-new . . .'

"I entered the room and there's a certain little ritual that goes on at these meetings. Charles sits in a certain chair and eventually everyone knows where they are to sit, in order of importance. I went all the way down to the other end of the table, sat down quietly, the meeting went on, I took some notes, nobody asked me any questions. However, as part of this same ritual, everybody gets up and leaves quickly when the meeting is over and Charles waits for the next group to come in.

"I turned around and everybody was gone. And there is Charles at one end of the table and me all the way down at the other end . . .just the two of us. Charles is basically a very shy man and terribly introverted . . . which is why he has built this whole little world around him as opposed to going out. That's why he eats inside every day and brings people to him, where he's comfortable. Even traveling, Charles has to bring his own environment with him -- which drives everybody else crazy -- because he feels confident then. I can understand it because he's shy.

'"Anyway, here we are alone together in the room. He doesn't even know who I am . . . I could be from the outside . . . and I was petrified of him. I couldn't talk. So I figure I've got to brazen it out and walk past him and get out of the room. I get up, gather up my papers, and start to walk -- smiling nicely to Charles as I go because there was nothing else I could do. As I start to walk by he says, 'You sit down.' So I do. And he says, 'Who are you?' And I say, 'Stanley Kohlenberg, Mr. Revson. I'm the new marketing director on Ultima.' He says, 'Oh, yes, I've heard about you.' Then there's a big silence.

"Now, the next thing Charles does, which is what he does to everybody he meets: he looks them over. He doesn't care how long it takes or what you're doing while he's doing it; he starts at your shoes and actually goes right up your body. You feel yourself being undressed. It seemed like hours, but it must have been a minute, or even less. I had a birthmark on my head, about the size of a dime . . . a black mole, which I don't have now. He looked at me directly, which he will always do to anyone, and says, 'What's that on your head?' I almost fainted because I thought something must have been crawling -- when you're born with a birthmark you don't even know it's there, because it is part of you. I said, 'What? Where?' I started to look around and he said, 'No, the thing on your head.' I said, 'My mother calls it a beauty mark, but I think it's a mole.' I felt like a little jerk. He said, 'It's no good for you. Take it off.'

"'Take it off?' He said, 'Yes, get rid of it because you will get sick from it.' I said, 'Mr. Revson, I've been to doctors for examinations and they said as long as it doesn't get bigger, or change color, it's okay.' He said, 'Those things are never good. Call Dr. Brauer [the staff dermatologist] and tell him to take it off your head.' I thought he was kidding, but he was worried about cancer. [And maybe he didn't like looking at it. Dr. Brauer thinks it was probably more the latter than the former.]

"I thought he was kidding, so I ignored it. I figured he'd never remember that. Two weeks later I'm sitting in a meeting and he turns to me and says: 'You didn't do it yet, did you?' I knew what he was talking about and I said, 'Well, I just started, Mr. Revson, and I have to – ' He says, 'Do it.' So he had told me again. And I put it off again. Next meeting with him, about a week later, I'm sitting on one side of him and Norman Greif, head of the research center, on the other, and he's fed up with me now and he turns to Norman and he says: 'Call Brauer and get that thing off his head.' Now he's got me to the point where I'm so aware of it that I'm looking in the mirror all the time.

"I go back to my office and there are several anxious calls from Dr. Brauer, who doesn't even know me. I call him and he says, 'Stan, I understand you're joining us and you have something on your head. Come up here quick and we'll take it off.' And by 'quick' he meant the next morning. So the next morning I go up to the lab, in the Bronx, where Brauer has his office. He sits me down in the chair, examines it, and says, 'I can't do it. It's too close to your eyebrow, and if I stitch it, it's liable to raise your eyebrow, permanently.' I'd look pleasantly surprised for the rest of my life. So I said, 'Okay, fine. Let's forget it.'

"'Oh, no,' he says, 'Charles wants it off. We'll make an appointment with a plastic surgeon, Dr. Rees.'

"I go back to the office and who do I bump into but Charles. 'You didn't do it. How come you didn't do it? I sent you up there -- why didn't you do it?' So I explained the situation to him and exaggerated a little and told him that Dr. Rees was going to operate on my head. 'He's going to operate on your head?' 'Yes,' I said, 'he's going to operate, take the whole thing out.' Charles said, 'You're not going to lose any time, are you?' You see, now he's drawn between two considerations. He wants it off my head, but he doesn't want me missing work. So I said, 'Don't worry, I'll do it at night and come in the next day.' It was just an office procedure, anyway. Charles went off on his annual August cruise, and by the time he came back Dr. Rees had removed the mole and, sure enough, the next day I was at work."

Postscript. "Charles comes back from the Mediterranean and now he doesn't notice I had it done. Finally we were in a meeting and Charles says, 'There is a plastic surgeon I know who uses a particular night cream, which he feels is very good as an emollient. We ought to find out what it is and maybe we can incorporate it into one of our lines. Who knows Dr. Rees?' So I raised my hand. That was the guy who operated on my head.

"Charles looks at me and says, 'How would you know Dr. Rees?' I said, 'Charles, he's the man who operated on my head. You sent me to him.' He said, 'No, I didn't. Dr. Brauer sent you to him.' [Charles did not like to be bested in even the most trivial exchange.]

"He never said another word about it again . . . not 'Good that you got it off,' or anything. But the basis for the whole thing was that Charles had accepted me as one of the family. I was going to work on his favorite line, Ultima, which was the line he most associated himself with, and to which he would soon be attaching his name. And it was important to him that I shouldn't get sick. What if this thing grew or became cancerous? [Or if he had to look at it every time they had a meeting?] Therefore, correct it.