The next weeks were not pleasant ones for Charles. On the one hand, he had this gnawing suspicion that his young bride might not have terminated affairs she had been having prior to their wedding. There had, apparently, been some difficulty in this regard during the courtship, and Charles had made it very clear that it was to stop.

The other thing was the impending marriage of his son John, just turned twenty-one, to Ricki Brody, nineteen-year-old daughter of a prominent New York restaurateur. Remembering his own early mistake, Charles was dead set against it. "He was horrified that a man his age would get married," Irving Botwin says. "He felt that his son should complete school and come into the business as a man who is able to take care of his wife. And he wasn't wrong, because otherwise he's throwing himself at the father and saying, 'Here, we're married. Take care of her.' This is a lack of manliness."

John, however, had become quite used to getting what he wanted. So, apparently, had Lyn. While preparations were being made for the Brody-Revson wedding at the Plaza, Charles was working with George Beck to satisfy his suspicions. If he was suspicious by nature, in this case at least it was not without cause. At one point he arranged to be out of town solely for the purpose of leaving his wife to her own devices. It became clear to him that Lyn was still seeing two men -- one, a matzoh monarch-by-marriage; the other, since deceased, head of a leading rent-a-car company. (It goes without saying that had he been cheating on Lyn, that would simply have been the male prerogative.)

It was touch-and-go for a while as to whether the fledgling marriage would come to an abrupt halt. Either way, Charles's pride had to suffer. It was handled this way: Lyn was given, in the words of one insider, "some very heavy papers" to sign as a supplement/amendment to the prenuptial agreement they had already drawn up. In these, allegedly, Lyn abrogated all rights to Charles's estate. There was even a termination clause, as one might find in an employment contract. Moreover, Lyn was moved out of the Revson suite at the Pierre and into one of her own at the Stanhope. She was on probation, in a sort of purgatory. It was like dating all over again. Charles would send the car for her in the evening, take her home at night, and spend weekends with her up at Premium Point. (The cover story was that the Pierre was simply too small for everyone.) He would even take back her jewelry at the end of each evening.

Meanwhile, John was getting married at the Plaza. Charles arrived late to the wedding, as he was late to everything. John, typically, was later still. "The tailor delivered my tails late," he explains. But what is forty-five minutes when you have a lifetime ahead of you? The tragedy was that the young Mrs. Revson did not. She and John were divorced five years later. Then, in April 1972, aged twenty-seven, she was found dead in her bathtub, an apparent suicide. During their years together, despite such savvy investments as a chunk of the musical Hair (with his mother and stepfather, John owned 20 percent, an investment which has to date multiplied forty-odd times over), John managed to go through much of his wife's substantial wealth. Like his father, he was always a big spender -- Ancky thinks he went through $2 million in one year -- but he lacked the personal fortune to back it up. Charles wound up bailing John out to the tune of several hundreds of thousands -- at least. The marriage had turned out to be even worse than he had feared; in this case he took no pleasure in having been proved right. Jill, his granddaughter by this marriage, became the single most important person in the last years of his life. He was able to lavish on her the kind of pure love he had never been able to offer anyone else.

John was also late to his second wedding. This marriage, to Alexis Turpin, ended in divorce as well. Charles was not late, because, in John's words, "nobody invited him." The only people present were the judge, John, Jill, Charles, Jr., Alexis, and her maid of honor. Charles was invited to the Harmony Club reception about a week later, arriving about midway through the affair. "When Dad walked in," Charles, Jr., says, "the place got very quiet. He just walked in and sat down, but you could see that his presence had a strange effect on the people there."

Oddly, while John's marriages were crumbling in direct testimony to the difficulty of growing up Charles Revson's son, Charles and Lyn were managing to make a go of it, after all. They became, in fact, quite the loving couple. "I think he was really devoted to her," Suzanne Grayson says, echoed by others. "The only time I ever saw him soft in any kind of personal relationship was with her." He would be at his most bilious, lambasting an executive . . . his gold phone would ring -- as it did a dozen times each day -- and he would switch instantly to a tender, "Yes, my darling. Where are you now, my darling? Of course, my darling." Without missing a beat, he would then return to the man's jugular. It had never been that way with Ancky. Time had turned the tables on him. He had never taken Ancky with him on business trips; he would never leave Lyn behind. His possessiveness came most openly into view at public affairs when the uninitiated would occasionally, and in all innocence, ask Lyn to dance. "Nobody dances with my wife other than myself," he would say icily for all to hear.

For her part, Lyn became "very attentive -- maybe even too attentive," to Charles. When they traveled, her friend Jerry Zipkin says, she would do everything -- "his pills, his arrangements, she would order his proper breakfast, sit right there as it was brought in to make sure it was right (because it was a very complicated breakfast) -- she was unbelievable."

When it came to the larger matters, such as Lyn's wardrobe, Charles was in charge. "He ran the house, he ran the yacht, he ordered the meals, he decorated the apartment. Lyn very wisely stayed out of it," Zipkin explains, "because then he wouldn't have anything to criticize. He treated her more like one of his executives than his wife."

His first order of business was to make Lyn over. Out went the high heels, the wad of chewing gum (it's back now), and the heavy makeup. He took Lyn to his tailor for her slacks, to get them just right. Very man-tailored, very simple. Norell would send his latest offerings up to the office and Charles would choose Lyn's wardrobe. The "look" he gave her was austere. Always a high neckline. "She has the most beautiful bosom in the world," Kay Daly confided, "and it was never again seen after she married Charles."

(When Ancky had once had her portrait done, Revson called the artist back to raise the V of her neckline. Caesar's wife must be beyond reproach.)

Lyn had loads of life and vitality. Charles toned her down and took some of the life out of her. She became somewhat hostile and bitchy, people said. She was not beloved by the crew of the Ultima II. She did, however, become a great hit with the press. About a year after they were married, the Revsons went on what was, in effect, a national publicity tour.

Before Lyn's first interview, Charles kept coming in to ask, "Sweetie, are you nervous? .... I'd be a lot less nervous if you went away," she said. And the next day, where he got just a couple of paragraphs buried in the business section of the paper, there was a half page of Lyn on the women's page with quotes and pictures. It happened that way all over, and it was great for Revlon.

"I'm not sunburned," she told Women's Wear in a full-page interview a couple of years before Charles left her, "it's makeup. People are always stopping me to ask where I got my tan. But, actually, it's the result of at least six different transparent makeup products. As a matter of fact, Charles and I have this running battle about my getting sunburned. I love sitting on the sundeck of our yacht when it is parked in the Mediterranean and just soaking up the sun. I often have to arrange to wake up earlier than Charles to do this, because if he catches me, he begins to lecture me on the dangers." She admits that on their last trip he really got through to her. "There was a cool breeze one day and I really wasn't aware of how much sun I was getting. The next day my eyes and lips were swollen. Charles didn't say a word. He knew I had learned my lesson, and now I am more careful."

Charles taught Lyn to blend her makeup. "Now," she says, "people don't even think I wear any. Actually, my makeup list is a yard long."

His feeling about makeup was -- ironically -- that most women use too much. Older women try to cover their wrinkles and wind up looking terrible. He bemoaned the problems he had trying to get his mother-in-law to use less.

To achieve her natural look, Lyn merely scrubbed with Ultima II Skim Milk Liquid Facial Soap followed by Ultima II Astringent Toner followed by Etherea B.C.O. Face Oil followed by Ultima II Transparent Bronzing Tint, Ultima II Blushing Creme (in Deep Sienna), and Ultima II Color Gel Stick in Bronzelit Copper to tint the chin, cheeks, and forehead. She listed twenty other Revlon products for the eyes, lips, scent, sun, and bath. Women's Wear faithfully recorded each one.

Charles, meanwhile, admitted to using Natural Wonder Clean-Up Lotion in the morning before his Remington Electric shave, and to deodorizing with Revlon's Mitchum Spray. ("Hi," says the Mitchum man woken up by the TV lights and camera crew in his bedroom, frankly: "I didn't use my antiperspirant yesterday, and I may not use it today . . .' Three-fifty a can.) Also: Braggi cologne, Bill Blass soap, and, nightly for ten years, Eterna 27.

Lyn went on to tell her interviewer how, when she finished making up, Charles would come over to her and pat her forehead and cheeks with a Kleenex. "It is his way of telling me, 'Now you look perfect,'" she said. "On the other hand, when I tell him I like his hair when it is longer, he gets a haircut. And that's his way of telling me that he is the authority."

"But," said Lyn, "he knows that I appreciate everything I have and that nothing would mean anything without my husband. For instance, I have this thing about bathing and perfume. I can take as many as three baths a day, and I use practically a bottle of bath oil a day. And I love perfume. I spray Ultima when I feel sexy and Norell when I feel elegant . . . Sometimes he watches me using the bath oil and the perfume, and he smiles and says, 'You know, it's a good thing I'm in the business.'"

It was probably most fun being Mrs. Charles Revson aboard the Ultima II. There were the cowboy movies under the stars ... the Christmases in Acapulco . . . the excitement of not knowing where you would be going from one day to the next (in later years, Charles took to telling the captain only the night before which port to steam for -- which meant frantic middle-of-the-night calls to groggy harbor masters, but gave him more of a feeling of control) . . . the crew lining up on deck, in uniform, with foghorn sounding, whenever the Revsons arrived or left for a cruise . . . the hot Mediterranean breezes, freezing staterooms, and warm-as-toast electric blankets . . . the fabulous service and unmatched cuisine . . . the Bingo and backgammon . . . the special television hookups for prizefights and presidential addresses (Charles was more interested in whether Nixon speeches would "sell" than in whether they were honest) . . . and, of course, the parties. Dinner guests aboard the yacht included the likes of Alec Guinness, Princess Grace and Prince Ranier, and the former president of Mexico. One party in Capri attracted such names as Faye Dunaway, the Earl of Litchfield, Valentino, Count and Countess Bismarck, Merle Oberon and Bruno Paglieri, and the Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitneys. Charles, et al, would sometimes dock at a port, go ashore and round up all the friends they met for a dinner that evening, radioing instructions back to the yacht on the walkie-talkie they always carried ashore.

How had he suddenly become so popular -- and so social? Any suggestion that Earl Blackwell, owner of Celebrity Register, and gossip columnists Eugenia Sheppard and Aileen Mehle (Suzy Knickerbocker) were on the payroll for this purpose is outrageous. But they were regular guests on the yacht (flown to and fro) and good friends, and so very helpful. Aileen Mehle was named Revlon's first female board member, at an annual compensation of $6,500, in 1972. Also, by happy coincidence, her column began appearing in the Daily News right around the time Revlon began advertising in that unlikely publication for the first time, to the tune of $50,000 or $100,000 a year.

Anyway, the Revsons began appearing in the columns with some regularity. And what people Earl and Eugenia and Arleen couldn't introduce them to, Jerry Zipkin ("The Duke and Duchess of Windsor are very good friends of mine") and Dennis and Ann Slater, always in the columns themselves, could. (Mrs. Slater was on the payroll for a while, "consultant to the chairman," arranging private luncheons with twelve or fourteen society ladies at a time -- Ann Ford, Mary Lou Whitney . . . )

Eat your heart out, Estee Lauder: the Revsons had become international socialites, too . . . with a little help from their friends. At one costume gala in Venice (Charles wore a plain dinner jacket), Estee Lauder only barely made it in. Earl Blackwell had arranged the affair, which the London Times called the "ball of the century," for the flood relief of Venice. The Ultima II and Onassis's yacht were among the many anchored in the Grand Canal. Blackwell, staying aboard the Revson yacht, naturally had not invited his host's archenemy, Ms. Lauder. So, according to Zipkin, she went to Paris, hired a press agent, and, with her husband, went in with him as "press." "I happened to be right there when they arrived," Zipkin says. "She made a sweeping good entrance off the barge, or whatever she came on . . . I can see her holding her husband's hand and the flashbulbs popping as they swept up the stairs ... and Earl Blackwell fainted dead away." Charles arrived shortly thereafter. "It may fascinate you to know," Zipkin told him, "that just five minutes ago Estee Lauder made a sweeping entrance." Charles had a fit. Whenever their paths crossed, he always got very uptight, very panicked. He could manage, at best, a curt bow.

Revson's noncosmetic rival was William Levitt, the home builder. Levitt's yacht was a few feet shorter than Revson's, and less well constructed, but it had a pool. And the Levitts could dive from their stateroom right into the ocean. Somehow a rivalry developed between these two not entirely dissimilar men. Perhaps Charles was irked simply because people did see it as a rivalry. At any rate, Earl Blackwell, having transformed Charles from a social hermit into an international jet-setter, began taking on much the same assignment for Levitt. And naturally, many of Blackwell's friends followed him.

Not so! says Blackwell, who finds the whole Revson/Levitt rivalry idea both fictitious and offensive. What happened, simply, was that one August 1st in Monaco, the day Charles and Lyn flew in to begin their summer cruise, the Levitt yacht was docked next door and the Levitts were giving a party. They sent over a nice note asking the Revsons to come, Blackwell says, but Charles, being tired from the flight, declined. (Eugenia Sheppard says he declined because he didn't like Levitt.) The revelers aboard Levitt's Belle Simone that night saw Charles, Lyn, and the doctor sitting alone, silhouetted in the moonlight, having dinner out on the deck. It might have been less awkward, Blackwell admits, if they had had dinner inside that night.

He preferred to dine at home with a business-related guest. It seemed to one such guest, whom Charles was trying to hire, that at least eight people were waiting on them. The only thing he found offensive about the Revson library/dining room, he says, was "a really awful portrait of Charles staring down from over the fireplace." Over dinner, there was little discussion of the job he was being offered, much discussion between Charles and Lyn as to the crispiness of the french fries -- was it sufficient? After dinner they spent two or three hours showing him the apartment, "a symphony in beige." The foyer, he thought, looked like the lobby of the Squibb Building. Charles made a point of the fact that the ceiling in their bedroom was genuine gold leaf. As they left one room and walked into another, Charles would grab hold of Lyn and kiss her. In all, the evening went on until three

Saturday was the ritual silent movie at Premium Point. Silent, because nobody talked to anybody. Two features would be shown, with one in reserve in case Charles decided (unilaterally) to kill one in mid-run. He wanted a good action plot, but he also watched with an eye for the appearance of the actors and actresses; the styles, clothes, houses, cars . . . At the end of one movie he turned to Irving Bottner and said: "If I were going to make an acquisition, it would be in sunglasses. From now on women are going to walk around in slacks, fur coats, flowing hair and sunglasses." According to a fashion maven who recalled the incident, his timing was perfect.

Sometimes Charles was amorous with his wife; other times, aggravated. There was a Sunday meeting up at Premium Point in the midst of a small blizzard. Lyn was quietly needlepointing in another room when Charles called her in and asked her to have the garage come put snow tires on the car. He wanted to be sure he could get in to work the next morning. She reported that the garage was closed -- the men hadn't been able to make it in on account of the snow. Charles was annoyed. Paul Woolard asked whether the tires were on rims -- if they were, he said, they could change them for him. Charles looked at Lyn, who asked, "What does that mean?" He got more annoyed and said something about women not knowing anything. He' put her down in front of everyone. She turned around and walked out. Charles went back to his meeting. He was facing away from the window, but others could see Lyn with her coat on, trudging through the snow to the garage. A few minutes later, they saw her rolling a tire from the garage across the snow and slush, picking up all sorts of dirt along the way. She rolls it on into the house, across a very light carpet, and right into the meeting. Charles looks up and there's this ugly tire. Lyn does the dumb-blonde routine: "Does this tire have a rim on it, Charles?" He says: "Why the hell did you bring it into the house?" She says: "Well, I didn't know, and you were so angry I thought I should show it to yon." She knew -- or even if she didn't, this was her way of getting even with him. She walked away while he carried on for another ten minutes about how dumb women are. Then he let it drop. But the tire sat there through the rest of the meeting, annoying him, and not much was accomplished. Lyn and Charles, in other words, were not entirely without their moments.

Mildred Custin, former president of Bonwit Teller, is one of many who thought that all in all it was "a lovely marriage." "He treated her like a child," she says. "He babied her. He always wanted her to be happy and cheerful." When he was first romancing her and they had had a little spat, he went out to Cartier and bought what might easily have been a hundred grand in gems. When he returned to their suite at the George V, in Paris, Lyn asked where he'd been. He said he'd been out working on some business. Then he said, "Here -- I found a little candy store and bought you some candy." And he tossed her the jewels, which he had put in a little brown paper bag. She dumped them out on the bed -- flabbergasted.

Later, Lyn became mad about a certain kind of little English terrier. Cables were going back and forth across the Atlantic to a Revlon International vice president. When he found just the right puppy, he was instructed to take it on board the plane with him in first class ("Don't put it in the hold; slip it under your arm"). And when he arrived in New York, Bill White, Charles's chauffeur (formerly Eleanor Roosevelt's; and jazz artist Josh White's brother), was at the airport with the Rolls to pick him up -- the only time he had ever been so met.

Eight years into their marriage, Charles celebrated his sixty-fifth birthday in Las Vegas with Lyn, Eugenia Sheppard, and one other couple. As they were driving in from the airport he reached into his briefcase and took out -- yes, another paper bag. "Here's something I forgot to give you," he said over his shoulder, from the front seat. He tossed it into her lap and Lyn pulled out a beautiful aquamarine and amethyst necklace.

But there was no telling with this man . . . you never knew what he was thinking. At their tenth anniversary party he presented her with a tin can containing a check for $30,000, plus five little Van Cleef & Arpels bracelets she had always wanted -- and began divorce proceedings two days later. Eugenia Sheppard attended the intimate Saturday night affair up at Premium Point. She says that as well as she knew the Revsons, she couldn't detect anything amiss. In fact, when she presented the anniversary gift she had brought -- an apple pie with an Ultima II replica frosting and "May Your Next Ten Years Be Apple Pie" written across the top -- Charles was delighted. "He said, 'We must get a camera and photograph it -- this is the most thoughtful gift we've had,'" Eugenia says. "Little did I think that would be the last time I would be in that house."

Yet Charles had been planning to leave Lyn for about a year, Irving Botwin says. ("When he told me, I was so surprised I dropped my cigarette on the floor.") Things had kept happening to delay him. There was his son's divorce, for example. He didn't want both to be going through divorce proceedings at the same time. It wouldn't look good.

He had gradually gotten fed up. "She was bugging him," Irving explains; "he didn't want to get dragged into her hysterics." And he was tired of being dragged to one affair after another. One executive overheard Charles's end of a phone conversation not long before he left her. They were having quite an argument, the gist of which was that she wanted him to go to a party with her that night, but he had already invited some of his marketing people over to the apartment for dinner and a meeting. He was telling her to go to the party herself, if she wanted to, because he was going to be busy all evening. She apparently didn't understand, because he then said, "Look, I've got business to do." And then it escalated to, "Look, I didn't want to go to France but I did what you wanted [they had just gone over for the Norton Simon/Max Factor gala, which he had managed to turn to Revlon's advantage] and I'm getting tired of this kind of thing." He sounded beleaguered, as though he were not winning. That evening, he had his meeting and she went to the party herself. About a month later, he left her.

He must have known at the time of his tenth anniversary party that he would have Judge Rifkind call Lyn the following Monday to break the news. (He never fired anyone himself.) But there was not even a hint of trouble at the party. The story goes that as he left for work that Monday morning he told the butler, "Take good care of Mrs. Revson today -- she'll need it." Lyn told Eugenia Sheppard that he was wearing the tie she had given him for Valentine's day.

Like all his decisions, this one had been mulled and mulled. ("Charles would fire you in his mind a year before anyone else knew it," Mandel had said.) According to Botwin, by this time one of his closest confidants, he had decided to change his life-style and gradually withdraw from the business, spending more and more time on his yacht, dating beautiful women, having last flings. The tenth anniversary timing may have been revenge, retribution for the embarrassment she had caused him some ten years before -- the kind of grudge it was by no means beyond him to bear. Or it may have been out of considerateness -- waiting until after the event so as not to embarrass her and as if to say: "There. We've had a good ten years, all in all, but now it's time to end it." Or it may simply have been that the occasion itself triggered a final decision.

Whatever it was, he left Lyn to break the news as she wished. She waited a full three weeks to do so. When she finally did talk to friends, after the news had been leaked in Earl Wilson's column, she said she could offer no explanation for his leaving her, that it had come as a total surprise.

There may have been other reasons for Charles's unexpected action. Eugenia Sheppard admits Lyn may not have told her the whole truth about the divorce -- "Her pride was at stake." But she is quite certain that the rumor of Lyn's having had another affair was untrue. "I'm sure of that. Lyn would not be that foolish. And whatever you say, she was really devoted to Charles in her own way."

After the breakup, friends of the couple had pretty well to join one camp or the other. Jack and Lorraine Friedman joined Charles's camp. "From the morning he left her," Mrs. Friedman says, "Jack and I were the only two people who knew about it for three weeks. And from that morning on I started calling her right away and she never answered the phone to me. I wrote her a note which I swear to you was the most beautiful note I've ever written in my life. I sat down and I cried over it. She never answered that. None of that bothered me until it was announced publicly and she told everybody, all our friends and everybody, that I had dropped her like a hot potato when Charles walked out on her. She said I had never tried to call her or do anything."