Who – Me?

"Defendant Charles Revson engaged in a practice of mistreating executives and abusing them personally to such extent that men of proven capacity who held high positions in nationally known corporations before and after their employment by Revlon, Inc. suffered humiliation and impaired efficiency during said employment and left Revlon, Inc. to escape mistreatment; these practices of defendant Charles Revson reduced working conditions for executives at Revlon, Inc. to a state of widespread ill-repute and ridicule until by 1957 the recruitment and replacement of executives at Revlon, Inc. had become extraordinarily difficult; the rate of turnover of Revlon executives became a subject of ribald humor."

-- Martin Revson, plaintiff

 

The headlines were extraordinary. This whole quiz show mania, touched off by The $64,000 Question and gripping the country for three years, had turned out to be a fraud. The front page, eight-column headline of The Washington Post, November 5, 1959, ran: EX-REVLON AIDE ADMITS TV FIX. This referred to an affidavit sent down to the congressional hearings by George Abrams, who invented the chocolate chip cookie, and it came at an embarrassing moment for the Revsons, each of whom was testifying that they had been flabbergasted -- just flabbergasted -- to learn that their shows, The $64,000 Question and The $64,000 Challenge, had been rigged. Meanwhile, the producers of the shows, who actually did the rigging, were blaming the Revsons, Martin in particular, for pulling the strings. President Eisenhower likened "this whole mess" to the Chicago Black Sox scandal of 1919 and said nobody would be satisfied until it was cleared up. Dave Garroway broke into tears on the Today show and had to leave the show half an hour early when his cohost, former quiz-show star Charles Van Doren, was dismissed from NBC for his role in the scandal. Revlon stock fell five points in one day.

Revlon loyalists will tell you it was Twenty-One, a rival show, and not The Question that was fixed. They will tell you, with a note of resignation at having been unfairly wronged, that most people think Charles Van Doren was on The Question, when in fact he was on Twenty-One. Dig a little deeper and you arrive at this somewhat subtle distinction: Twenty-One was fixed; The Question and The Challenge were "controlled." Charles Van Doren and others on Twenty-One were actually given answers before the show, and were taught to stammer and stutter for dramatic effect. ("Let's skip that part of the question till later, please.") The air conditioning in the isolation booth was purposely left off so that contestants would sweat under the hot lights, as if from tension. Contestants on The Question were not handed answers; instead the producers ascertained in advance just what they did and did not know and devised their questions accordingly. It amounted to much the same thing.

Xavier Cugat testified that each time before he was to appear on The Challenge he would be visited at his apartment by a man from the show who would ask him a series of questions and provide answers to those that stumped him. The same questions would later be asked on the show itself, and Cugat managed to win $16,000. He told the House subcommittee, as if right out of Peter Pan: "I know that as an entertainer I am called upon all the time to make believe, to help make a good show. I suppose the producers of The $64,000 Challenge also wanted to make a better show, and so they made believe, too. If there was too much make believe, I wish you could do something about it without giving entertainment too much of a black eye."

John Ross, manager of twelve-year-old actress Patty Duke, testified that she had been fed questions right before going on the air to compete with twelve-year-old actor Eddie Hodges, with whom she tied and split $64,000.

The Daily News headline oŁ November 5, 1959, read like a parody of a Daily News headline: HAD BANK VAULT KEY, SAYS GIRL TV FIXER. The girl TV fixer (not a TV repairwoman, you understand) was none other than thirty-six-year-old Shirley Bernstein, Leonard's sister. (The Bernsteins' father, coincidentally, was a Revlon Jobber in Boston.) Ms. Bernstein was associate producer of The Challenge. She was in reality the producer, she testified, only Revlon "felt very strongly that a woman should not get the producer credit." Her statement was taken by Richard N. Goodwin, an ambitious House subcommittee staffer one year out of Harvard Law School (first in his class) out to make a name for himself.

Ms. Bernstein would have extensive discussions with the contestants to find out the range of their knowledge, she said, "so that in writing the questions I could, with some degree of success, prognosticate the outcome of the match." She would ask questions almost identical to those that were to be asked on the show when Revlon requested a particular outcome.

Goodwin: Was this request made of you?

Bernstein: Not directly, but through Mr. Carlin [the executive producer].

Goodwin: Was it your complete understanding from the start that you were receiving instructions from the sponsor as to how a match should come out?

Bernstein: Yes, completely. There were many meetings with the sponsor where Mr. Carlin would come back white with anger.

Goodwin: Did Mr. Carlin ever tell you directly that the sponsor had requested a particular outcome to a match?

Bernstein: Yes.

Goodwin: With what degree of accuracy would you control the outcome of a match?

Bernstein: At the peak of my efficiency, about 80 percent. Ms. Bernstein said that both she and her assistant had keys to the famous Manufacturers Hanover Trust vault (Revlon's bank of long standing), and that they would go in and get the questions at any time.

No one disputed that there had been weekly meetings between the producers, the agency people, and Revlon, chaired by Martin. Yet Charles and Martin denied any knowledge of the controls. PROBERS SEE PERJURY OVER $64,000 FIX, ran the Herald Tribune headline, with the subhead: Revsons Deny Ordering Rigging; Producers Swore Sponsor Did.

Charles would attend the meetings only infrequently, usually at the tail end just to express his general dissatisfaction. (Weekly meetings with a sponsor were unheard of in the TV business, but Revlon was a uniquely demanding sponsor -- and had a lot at stake.)

Martin admitted that he would voice opinions at these meetings as to which contestants had audience appeal and which he hoped would lose. He admitted that his opinions could be forcefully stated. But he claimed to have no idea that his wishes would be taken as orders, or that the producers had some way of carrying them out. Neither was he apparently surprised to notice, as the weeks and months went on, the remarkable consistency with which his idle wishes, expressed innocently at these meetings, seemed to be fulfilled.

Mr. Carlin, executive producer of the show, told the subcommittee they would discuss "every possible phase of the show . . . in the minutest detail." Martin admitted that, but testified he "never once suggested that a contestant win or lose." Carlin said Martin made "urgent suggestions that certain contestants leave the show." (One contestant they tried -- and failed -- to dump was Dr. Joyce Brothers, the lady boxing expert. It was thought she had a grating personality that turned off the viewers.)

Martin went so far as to say that had he ever known that the shows he sponsored were controlled in any way -- he would have dropped them . . . even though they were catapulting his company's sales and profits beyond even his wildest hopes.

George Abrams, who attended the weekly meetings with Martin, testified that "we understood . . . the technique used for controlling the destiny of a contestant." It's true that George would do almost anything for a headline-but would he lie to make himself look bad?

"Somebody is not telling the truth here," concluded Congressman Steven B. Derounian of New York.

 

Charles, meanwhile, had all but escaped coming under this embarrassing congressional spotlight. Subcommittee staffers had sifted through a great deal of material and decided it was not necessary to call him to testify. At the last minute, he sent a telegram to the committee insisting on his right to do so. It was not the smartest thing Charles Revson ever did. In his defense, it should be said that he sent the telegram on advice of a public-relations expert. The thought was that all the other witnesses would doubtless try to shift the blame onto Revlon, so Charles should have a chance to defend the company's good name. It's quite possible Charles really didn't know the extent of Revlon's implication in the controlling of the shows, and accordingly feared less than he should have.

One problem was that the congressmen assumed Charles knew what Martin knew -- that if one brother was fibbing, the other was, too. Charles couldn't come right out and tel1 the congressmen that he and Martin had not been on speaking terms for some time -- that they would pass each other at these very congressional hearings without so much as a nod. That would have been embarrassing. At one point it was Martin's turn to resume his testimony. The chair asked Charles if he knew the whereabouts of his absent brother, and he had to admit he did not. It became a bit awkward, Bill Mandel recalls. When Martin did show up -- late for his own testimony at a congressional hearing -- he was apologetic: "May I say, Mr. Chairman, I am sorry I was late. I was at the Hotel Statler. One rest room was busy and I went to the other, and it was busy and I went upstairs."

Charles spent three days at the hearings waiting to be called. Mandel, who was with him, says he was magnificent in a crisis. "He taught me not to panic." His first reaction upon hearing of the brewing quiz scandal, Mandel says, months before the hearings, had been to go over to see Bill Paley at CBS. Paley was another egotistical entrepreneur whose Russian-Jewish emigrant father had been in the cigar business -- only Paley's father owned the cigar business. According to Mandel, Revson told him there was only one thing for CBS to do and that was to appoint a TV-industry "czar" to investigate all questions of quiz-show propriety and oversee such problems in the future. In other words, head Congress off at the pass. "Charles was right," says Mandel, "and they wouldn't listen to him."

So he is now at a hotel in Washington, scheduled to testify at ten A.M., to be accompanied by no less an attorney than Clark M. Clifford. Mandel wakes him at eight, which is early for Charles, and hands him a copy of the final draft of his statement. Carl Erbe is about to take the statement up to the Hill to have it mimeographed and distributed, to make the afternoon papers. Charles says: "Wait a minute; I haven't read it yet." Mandel says: "We've been on this thing for two days now; you've changed it eighteen times; if we don't get it up to the press it doesn't make the papers; and if it doesn't make the papers, our side never gets heard."

"Okay," says Charles, getting out of bed, getting a fountain pen, and getting back into bed. He is scheduled to testify at ten, remember. "We sit there from nine to nine-thirty . . . to ten . . . ten-thirty," says Mandel, "and he's rewriting his statement. My stomach is going through the roof and I keep telling him he'll be in contempt and all that stuff. He doesn't care. He's as calm as can be. Finally, he's satisfied with it, so I rush it over and Carl has it retyped and mimeographed . . . we finally got up to the Hill, I don't know what time it was, and they don't call him until four o'clock. This man has never been on time for anything in his life and he's never suffered for it. I don't know why."

He did fail to get his side of the story to the press in time, however, prompting Mandel to comment: "He was calm, but I don't know if it was worthwhile. Maybe it would have been better to get excited and get our stuff to the papers. That's a microcosm of my dealings with Charles; his lack of priorities, his sense of proportion."

Charles was simply not one to be rushed. In this respect he could not have been less like the high-strung, nail-chewing, instant-retort Mandel. He would not make snap decisions -- he chewed his cud. He would not walk fast -- perhaps out of fear for his heart. He never wolfed down his food. He didn't talk fast. "He could destroy an airline by getting to a plane just as the doors were closing," says Irving Botwin -- and he wouldn't be running down the ramp, either. He was even late for his son John's wedding (as was John).

When it finally did come time for Charles to testify, he said that he never missed watching The Question if he could possibly help it. He would walk out of a theater in the middle of a play just to watch the show on Tuesday nights to see whether the Italian shoemaker would win $32,000 by answering a question on Italian opera. "Sure, I was the sponsor," he said, "but I was just like the rest of the millions of Americans caught up in the drama of this program. If I had known that these shows were fixed, crooked, rigged, do you think for one minute that I would have watched or bothered this way?" A cynic might point out that watching the shows was the only way Revson could see his own live commercials, which may have been of more interest to him than the questions and answers; and that even people who fix prizefights generally turn out to watch the contest.

Revson concluded his statement deftly: "Remember that [the producers] admitted to this committee yesterday that they also rigged The Big Surprise... [That show and ours] had only one thing in common. It was not the sponsor, it was the producer. This producer would have you believe that sponsor pressure from Revlon drove him to do what he did on our show. Then what caused him to rig The Big Surprise?"

It was a neat twist -- but not enough to appease the congressmen, who were by this time in the hearings feeling their self-righteous oats.

Mr. Rogers: You made a lot more [from these shows] than any of the contestants or all the contestants put together, didn't you?

Mr. Revson: . . . Yes, we did.

Mr. Rogers: Since you have branded these as deceitful practices, have you made any efforts or thought of any way to make restitution of that money to the American people?

Mr. Revson: I would not truthfully know how to answer that question, sir.

Mr. Rogers: I don't either, Mr. Revson.

Mr. Revson: Pardon me?

Mr. Rogers: I would not know how to answer it either. I just wonder -- you and your brother come up here and say you were victims of fraud, too, but you were the kind of victims of the fraud that some of the winners on these contests were -- that is, you profited very well by being a victim. You brand these other people as deceitful, and I agree with you, they were deceitful; but you are the one who profited the most by the deceitful practices that were played upon the American people. I am wondering what is in your mind and the mind of the Revlon Company, to try to make restitution or correction of a wrong which you admit occurred.

Mr. Revson: We have never given any thought to that.

Mr. Rogers: Apparently, some of the contestants had not given any thought to giving their money back, either . . .

Mr. Revson: In view of the circumstances, we went along for the several years in sponsoring the show. We did not realize what it was. It is the same as any other commercial company that would earn something because of something -- a network or producer or contestant, and so forth. I don't know how to answer it. It is something that is past. It is part of a business experience.

Mr. Rogers: Yes, sir. You are not planning on giving the money back or making restitution, are you, Mr. Revson?

Mr. Revson: I had not even discussed it or thought about anything in that vein. I think, in turn, by virtue of the fact that it was done yesterday, I don't think there is a basis for it.

Mr. Rogers: You don't think there is a basis for it when someone obtains something by false pretenses that they ought not to make restitution? Is that your statement?

Mr. Revson: No, but see, we paid for the show. We paid for the time. We paid for the contestants, sir. So, therefore, in turn, we made a profit on it. I don't follow you there. I am not trying to be cute.

Mr. Rogers: I don't follow you. You have branded this, you and your brother both branded this as a deceitful practice and a reprehensible practice. Yet you are willing to accept the profits from it and let the contestants take all of the blame. Both of you said you had nothing to do with the running of it. The most you did was to make suggestions, isn't that correct?

Mr. Revson: Yes, sir.

Mr. Rogers: Were those suggestions subtle suggestions, Mr. Revson?

Mr. Revson: The suggestions made as far as I am concerned had no relativity to that.

Mr. Rogers: You mean they were about as subtle as a blow by a baseball bat?

Mr. Revson: I certainly do not.

Mr. Rogers: That is what the evidence would indicate, as you know. You heard the testimony.

Mr. Revson: I heard it, yes.

Mr. Rogers: It would indicate [that] when . . . Mr. Martin Revson made a suggestion, there was not any question in his mind or anyone else's mind as to what he meant and what he intended to have.

Mr. Revson: That is correct.

Mr. Rogers: That is actually what happened. A suggestion was made and you expected it to be carried out?

Mr. Revson: Pardon me?

Mr. Rogers: A suggestion that was made in one of these meetings you expected to be carried out, didn't you?

Mr. Revson: I didn't get the first part, then. I thought I got it.

Mr. Rogers: I say, that in these meetings you had, when you made a suggestion, which you claim you had the right to do under your contract, you expected that suggestion to be carried out, didn't you?

Mr. Revson: The few infrequent times that I was there, I don't remember discussing anything about a contestant or anything like that. The times that I would be in there would have relation to the format of the show, or possibly a change in the plateau aspects of the money part, or the show could be more interesting, or something such as that.

Throughout the congressional massacre, which covers a full thirty pages in the printed transcript, Clark Clifford sat slouched deeply in his chair, perhaps sorry be ever got into this mess in the first place. For his afternoon's efforts he sent Charles a bill for $25,000. "When Revson gets the bill," Clifford said, "he'll cuss and call me a son of a bitch and the whole business. But he'll pay it. And next year, when he's down in Miami Beach playing gin rummy with his buddies, he'll talk about 'his friend Clark Clifford,' and how much the so-and-so charged him -- and it'll be worth twenty-five thousand dollars to him."

Clifford may have believed Revson was innocent of wrongdoing in connection with The $64,000 Question, but apparently Charles was not "his kind of guy" and he felt no compunction about screwing him.

 

As if the congressional hearings hadn't been bad enough, they were followed only four months later, in March 1960, by an even more embarrassing controversy. Brother Martin, by now two years gone from the company, was suing brother Charles for fraud, seeking $601,460.80, and alleging (rather irrelevantly), that Charles "humiliated," "mistreated," and "abused" executives to the point that working conditions at Revlon had become the subject of "widespread ill-repute and ridicule."

A tenet of Charles's existence was to avoid embarrassment, let alone ridicule, and this suit dished up both. He managed to 'have the most offensive paragraph struck from the complaint, on the basis of its irrelevance -- but not before it had been brought to the attention of the national press. (The full text of the deleted paragraph may be found at the head of this chapter.)

Ordinarily, Charles went out of his way to avoid legal problems. Revlon attorneys were faced with the fact that their star witness simply refused to go into court or even to give a deposition. "He had a fear of the law and certainly a fear of being a witness -- he was almost paranoid in this respect," says one of the lawyers who was instructed to settle out of court many cases that could easily have been won. He may have been afraid of being tied up in knots by a Perry Mason-type cross examination; he may have feared probes into some of Revlon's dicier activities from the distant past; he did not enjoy confrontations of any sort (in the old days, he would take the elevator up an extra flight in the Squibb Building and then walk down the back stairs to his office to avoid running into insiders or outsiders who might have been lying in wait for him). Yet in the case of Martin's suit -- although it eventually was settled out of court -- pride for a while got the better of paranoia.

Martin's attorney, William G. Mulligan, professed "amazement and dismay" that the suit had hit the papers, and swore that he and his client had "maintained absolute silence." In the then prevailing atmosphere, however, one must assume that Martin was more pleased than mortified to see his charges widely quoted, and that Charles was more mortified than pleased. Charles would state only that the suit was without merit, and that he regretted it. "It is unfortunate," he said, "that the language of the complaint contains the kind of emotional statements which sometimes characterize suits involving members of the same family."

(To try to bolster the generally disastrous public image Charles was building on what seemed an almost month-to-month basis, Bill Mandel arranged to have him retain a distinguished old-line public-relations firm. He set up a meeting at Charles's suite at the Pierre so that the P.R. experts could assess Revson and decide whether to take him on as a client. As Bill and Charles were sitting there, laying on the charm -- the pushy but sincere Jewish kids trying to develop a rapport with the Ivy Leaguers -- Bill Heller walked in with the night's entertainment . . . a woman whom, all things considered, it would be best not to have join the conversation. Mandel frantically shunted Heller and guest off into another room; Charles was taken on as a client; it did no appreciable good. (Mandel does not remember the Heller aspect of the meeting but does not deny its plausibility.)

The suit was an offshoot of Martin's leaving the firm. Doubtless it could have been settled amicably had Martin left on amicable terms but, as will be further noted, such was not the case. The suit concerned 231,000 shares of Revlon stock which Martin owned, but which he had assigned to the famous "voting trust." Martin owned the stock, but Charles, as sole trustee, controlled it.

Martin wanted to remove his stock from the trust; Charles was in no hurry. He didn't want Martin to be in a position to dump a lot of stock on the market and thereby depress the value of Revlon shares; and, more importantly, he was determined to keep at least 51 percent of the company under his own control. With Martin's 231,000 shares in the trust, Charles controlled about 55 percent of the stock. Without it, he would have controlled less than half.

As a practical matter, Charles would have had effective control of the company with less than a majority of the stock. However, Charles's "neurotic anxieties" on this point -- as Martin's lawyers referred to his concern -- may have stemmed from the frustrating years when Revlon was still a private company and Charles had to submit decisions to Lachman for approval. Or perhaps they stemmed simply from Charles's general paranoia.

Nonetheless, control over a majority of Revlon stock could hardly hurt, and Charles was determined to have it. Martin came up with a possible solution: 131,000 of his shares would be released to him, which would still leave Charles control over a majority of Revlon stock. The remaining 100,000 shares would be sold back to Revlon itself in exchange for stock in Schering Corporation, a pharmaceutical company Revlon had for a time been trying to acquire.

Charles decided this wasn't such a bad idea . . . only he wanted Martin to agree to give up $6 a share in figuring the value of his Revlon stock. In other words, for Revlon stock that was selling at $35 a share in the open market, Martin would be given only $29 worth of Schering stock. Charles offered Martin three reasons, Martin alleged, to accept such a deal. First, he claimed to have inside information that Schering stock would very likely do better than Revlon stock over the coming year, so Martin would come out ahead. Second, if Schering did outperform Revlon -- what would Revlon's other shareholders think if Charles had made an even swap? Mightn't they accuse him of giving his brother a sweet deal? Charles claimed he had been advised by his lawyers that he couldn't make an even swap of the Revlon and Schering stock without inviting lawsuits. (But, Martin alleged, no such legal opinion had in fact ever been rendered.) Third, Martin could not get the full $35 a share if he tried to sell his shares on the open market, because a block of stock that large would knock down the market price. So it would only be fair to accept a discount in this deal, also.

Martin said a $6 discount was too much; Charles agreed to cut it to $4. Martin said a $4 discount was too much; Charles agreed to cut it to $3. What's more, according to Martin, Charles promised that in the unlikely event Schering stock did not outperform Revlon over the following year, he would see to it that Martin got the extra Schering stock he was forfeiting by accepting the $3 discount.

As it turned out, Schering stock appreciated a stunning 71 percent over the designated time period (August 15, 1958 to July 15, 1959). Only, Revlon stock appreciated even a bit more -- by 75 percent. And Martin, notwithstanding his $2 million profit on the Schering stock, expected Charles to stick to what he understood their agreement to be: namely, to deliver the Schering stock Martin had forfeited by accepting the $3 discount on his Revlon shares. He demanded either 7,518 Schering shares or $601,460.80 in cash. (The amount to which those shares would have appreciated by the time the suit was filed.)

Charles claimed he had never made any such promise. "Show it to me in writing," was the essence of his position, and Martin had nothing to show.

After a modest amount of backing and forthing, barking and frothing, they settled out of court. Charles paid Martin $300,000 out of his own pocket.

The suit itself was really just a battle in a larger war between the brothers. Many said that the provocateur of this war had been Julie Revson, Martin's wife. Julie knew both men well, and it was her opinion, no doubt biased as a consequence of her marriage, that Martin should be running the show. She wanted him at least to be president, with Charles kicked upstairs to the chairman's seat. After some pressure Charles had actually agreed to such a change in titles, to go into effect by 1959, but Martin did not stay around that long. He explains why:

"I'm not going to tell you all the inner feelings that I had, because I don't want to reveal them. I'll give you a general answer. While he and I got along very well when it came to merchandising and products . . . we didn't always agree on finances. My compensation. Also, while I had tremendous latitude, certain things still had to be cleared to his opinion. And sometimes, whether it was the name of a product or something like that, it became kind of sticky. I felt, after we had so many meetings, if he said, 'No' and 'Why don't you fellows go back and look at it again?' -- it became a little irritating. Things like that.

"Those are the two factors, I think. And the other things had nothing to do with my wife, although he thought they did. We never discussed this, really, but he thought, I think, that if I hadn't been married to her it would have been different. I assure you it wouldn't. I assure you that the main reason is the certain individuality some of us have -- I like to think I have it -- and because of that individuality I've contributed to the company. I don't know what people on the outside think, but I know what I contributed -- it's been large. Things he may not have seen because he wasn't close enough to it.

"So this is what looms large in my mind -- that my contribution was great to the company. While it was recognized by him, I'm sure, it wasn't always said. And little things took place and grew into large things. Then there became little personal things which I don't want to go into. Human relations, et cetera. Our relationship had deteriorated . . .

"Our problems stemmed from -- part of it was wives, that was true . . . he didn't want to take Ancky to the convention, so my wife couldn't go to the convention -- things like that -- and part of it was inside the business. A different philosophy about certain things in the business -personalities, people, their actions, what makes an executive... I think a lot of things stemmed from that. His viewpoint and mine differed on many people.

"I irritated him and he irritated me on certain things. The point is, I wasn't going to let him . . . It wasn't a point of wanting to run the company myself or supercede him or kick him out of the business. I never thought of that. I always knew his value . . . I felt that these personal irritants had grown to such a degree it would be better for us to go our separate ways . . .

"So I made my decision in February [1958]. When Charles and I sat down on a Monday morning I opened the meeting by saying: 'I have it in mind of leaving.' He asked why. I said: 'It's got to the point where our views are different. There's no sense in going through any details -- why don't I leave amicably?' If he was surprised, he didn't indicate it. He was calm through the whole matter, which he had a way of being during matters like this."

They agreed that Martin would stay until a replacement could be found. When Charles kept stalling on the question of releasing Martin's stock from the voting trust, Martin told him, "I'm not discussing anything else until we settle this matter." He collected a few papers and never appeared in the office again. But because his resignation was in a sort of limbo, his office at 666 Fifth Avenue -- never occupied -- was kept empty, but fully furnished and dusted daily, in case he should one day show up back on the job.

 

It took thirteen years for the fraternal rift to mend. During those years Charles was nothing short of frigid on the subject of his brother. "What brother?" he once said. "I don't have a brother." What made this state of affairs bizarre was that the two Revson families remained in close proximity. Their sons went to each other's houses, went riding together; Charles and Martin could be sitting close to each other at a horse show at Konrad Fischer's Kenilworth stables and they wouldn't even say hello.

Charles blamed wives; Martin, as quoted, maintains this was not so. But he does credit wives -- a new set -- with bringing about the reconciliation. "That's the happy thing, that we got back together," he says. "I think Lyn was an important instrument in getting us back together. She and Eleanor [Martin's second wife] got along fine. I think she convinced Charles; and Eleanor convinced me."

 

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