Yes, He Painted His Nails

Many people achieve a certain success at a given point and take it to a certain level. Being able to sustain it, and then carry it further, all in one man, is very rare. That man must say to himself, "I'm going to rebuild myself. I'm going to broaden my vision, I'm going to think differently, I'm going to change my stature, my appearance, my manner of operating my company, my relationships with my people. And I'm going to go to the next plateau." It takes a very unusual man.

-Sol Levine, Revlon executive vice president

In Revson's last full year at the helm, 1974, Revlon reported sales (rounded off to the nearest $1,000) of $605,937,000. By contrast, in its first nine months of existence, in 1932, sales were $4,055.09 -- and there was no thought of rounding off the $55.09, because it was enough to pay his salary for two weeks, or two months' rent.

The following year, sales rose smartly to $11,246.98. Of this, expenses were as follows:

Nail enamel, bottles, etc. .......... $4,792.26
Wages .......................................... 813.80
Rent ............................................. 330.00
Miscellaneous taxes ...................... 161.29
Trucking and parcel post .............. 345.67
Shipping supplies .................... 133.71.71
Advertising (in trade journals) ....... 978.32
Telephone .................................... 136.88
Traveling and miscellaneous .......... 772.13
_________
$8,402.06

That left $2,844.92 for the three partners: Charles and Joseph Revson, with 25 percent each, and Charles Lachman, with 50 percent. (The profit in 1974 was $50 million.)

In 1974, Charles Revson had a home in the country, a triplex at 625 Park Avenue, a chauffeur-driven Rolls, and a personal staff (including the crew of his yacht) of forty-four people. He drew a $330,000 salary and collected $1,300,000 in dividends. He made more than $1 million in charitable donations and paid $131,000 in federal income tax. In 1934, he lived with his father and brothers at 625 West 164 Street in Washington Heights and rode the subway to work. He earned a total of $2,521.60 for the year, $50.79 of which was paid in federal income tax.

The multimillion-dollar account Revlon maintained at the Manufacturers Hanover Trust Company in 1974 was opened on December 20, 1933. For all of 1934, it averaged a $400 balance. We know this because even then Harry Meresman was toting up the figures for the firm -- on a $15-a-month retainer -- and Harry Meresman is not one to throw anything away. Now he sits on the Revlon board and, with former judge Simon Rifkind, executes the Revson estate.

Iris Heller, who subsequently became a major figure in the beauty business herself, met Charles for the first time in 1933, when she was seventeen. She now believes that Charles "killed" her second husband, Bill Heller. But for nearly thirty years Charles and Iris got along nicely, and her recollection of their first meeting is vivid.

"I was working for Seligman and Latz," she remembers. "We had thirty or forty beauty salons then, around eight hundred now, and we were at 119 West 57 Street. I was going to Barnard at night and had just gotten married the previous December, to the horror of my father . . . I can't explain the pressures of the Depression, but I know that my kids used to say to me, 'Tell us a bedtime story, Mommy, but don't tell us about when you were poor.' Anyway, my boss, Edwin Latz, was taking me to lunch in what used to be the Metropolis Club, and I was hoping to God I'd know which fork to use. We started to go to lunch and there was this attractive young man sitting on a bench in our waiting area. Even then I remember that I'd never seen a man with eyes that color. They were kind of no color. Well, I suppose you'd call them gray. It's the kind of gray that makes you think of guns and battleships and storms. [Or at least it made one writer think of those things when she published a roman a clef about Revson twenty-five years later, which may be where Iris got the image.] I'd never seen eyes as cold as that. The other thing about him is that he was wearing a jacket and trousers that did not match. And this was not the era of sports jackets and slacks, The Great Gatsby notwithstanding. In other words, it was obvious that he just didn't own a whole suit. Which may be one of the reasons that Charles has put such an emphasis since then on clothes.

"Anyway, we went to lunch and we were there a long time and when we came back this guy was still there. I have a fetish about not keeping people waiting, and so I said to Mr. Latz, 'That man was there before we went to lunch and he's still there and we've been gone for a couple of hours.' And he said, 'Find out what he wants.' So I went over to him and asked him what he wanted. He said that Mr. Latz owed him some money. Latz said he didn't owe anyone any money, and Charlie said, 'Oh, yes you do. You owe me forty-eight dollars.'

"' ’What for?' asked Latz.

"' ’For some nail polish that Mr. Kaplan, your purchasing agent, bought.'

"' ’Well, young man, what do you want me to do? Check us with Dunn and Bradstreet -our credit's very good.'

"Charlie smiled and said, 'I know your credit's very good, but my credit's not so good. My brother's walking around downstairs, and we need the money.' Now, Latz swears he said he needed the money so that his mother could buy more ingredients to cook up some more polish on the stove, but I think that's just Latz being dramatic. Anyway, I went to get the money out of petty cash, because it was too late to get a check cashed, and by this time Charles was in Latz's office and they were having a discussion about nail polish and the mechanics of the manicurist, which were certainly different then from today. I think they got twenty-five dollars a week then, plus a small percentage over a certain level. And the idea then was to have the moon and the tips of the nail white, and the center, red. At any rate, when he stepped outside I asked my boss what he had wanted, and Latz said Revson had asked whether he wanted to invest five thousand dollars for a half interest in his business. Latz maintains to this day that he said a fifty percent interest. My guess is that he said only 'an interest.'

"One thing I will say that I shared with Charles is instinct. So I said, 'For goodness' sake, do it. This has to be great.' Now, you have to remember that five thousand dollars in 1933 is not five thousand dollars today. But the other nail polishes that were on the market were nothing, and this guy was an intense promoter. People had just begun to talk about his polishes being good. He had color. A whole range. And they stayed on, the others didn't. And manicuring had just begun to come into its own -- the longer fingernails and the whole bit.

"Anyway, I told Latz he should do it and he thought it was kind of wacky and he gave me a cliché for which he is famous, about 'a shoemaker sticking to his last.' But I knew this was going to be a great thing so I tore out in the hall after him, and I said, 'Mr. Revson,' and he corrected me and said, 'Charles' -- interestingly, not 'Charlie,' I've never heard him pleased at being called Charlie -- and I said, 'I haven't got five thousand dollars, but I could probably scrape together five hundred.' (God only knows how I was going to do that.) 'How much of the business could I buy for that?' He said, 'None, but we could have a hell of a week someplace.' Or some funny little remark like that. But even with a twinkle in his eye, you know, he didn't twinkle. There's something about him. It's an iceberg about to mow you down. At any rate, I said, 'Well, I'm married.' And he said, 'You, married?' You know, I was just a kid. 'Where do you live?' he asked, and I told him. 'Can you cook?' I said, 'Yeah, why?' He said, 'Well, why don't you invite me up for dinner?' And he did subsequently come up for dinner. In fact, he brought his brother, Joe, and his partner Charlie Lachman, without telling me he would, and I just barely had enough hamburger to make it. I cut up more bread and green peppers that night than I've ever in my life done."

Like most companies, Revlon had a humble beginning. What gets lost in the comparison of 1934 and 1974 is the speed with which the company, and with it Charles, became secure. By 1937 he had -- by most standards, and certainly by those of the Depression -- "made it." In that year he drew a princely $16,500. Sales had multiplied forty-fold in just four years. The average bank balance was up fifty-fold. Even after plowing $62,000 back into advertising, there was an $18,000 profit.

The next year, 1938, the company merely tripled in size. Charles's salary-plus-bonus jumped to $39,000 -- a lot for a single fellow in those days of the nickel subway ride and the $1,695 Cadillac. Thus, from 1930, when he left his cousin's dress company at the age of twenty-four, to 1937 or so, aged thirty, Charles Revson was struggling to make it; and for the rest of his life he was just struggling to make it bigger.

The year lipstick was added to Revlon's line of nail-care products, 1940, sales more than doubled over the previous year, to $2.8 million. They sextupled in the forties, septupled in the fifties, and nearly tripled in the sixties, reaching $371 million in 1970. By 1980, one might guess, even though Charles bowed out around the $600-million level, the figure could easily surpass $1 billion or more, particularly with the acquisitions Revson's successor, the man from ITT, is likely to make.

One naturally wonders how this great enterprise was launched.

A company press release from the fifties, leaving out Charles's first wife, his trip to Chicago, and his brief career in the sales-motivation field, romanticizes the founding of Revlon as follows:

It was a bleak November morning back in the depression year of 1931, and Charles Revson, then in his very early twenties [25], badly needed a job. Over a cup of coffee in the Automat, young Revson scanned the sparse Help Wanted ads in the paper -- a perusal that similarly occupied thousands of other jobless men at the time.

Two of the ads were for selling jobs; one for a man to sell household appliances -the other, a man to sell cosmetics. Each required applicants to appear in person, and at the same time the following morning. Charles knew there would be a long line at both places. He had never sold either household appliances or cosmetics. So, tossing a nickel in the air, he let chance decide where he would go; heads -- cosmetics, tails -- household appliances.

The coin landed on the table, heads up, and at dawn the next morning, Charles Revson was waiting for the offices to open. He got the job. A little more than a year later, Revlon was born.

That was the last time anything concerning Revlon was left to chance.

 

There may be in this press release a little of what Charles years later referred to as "honest fiction." "Publicity," he told a gathering of his executives from around the world in 1969, in his own only partially coherent ad-lib style, "is honest fiction. Honest fiction. Now, what does that mean? There is honesty about publicity? But there has to be a basis of fiction about it, otherwise it's not readable. Who the hell wants to read it? Nobody. You want [people] to read about some product being introduced -- so [you say], 'The fellow went down forty-six flights of stairs, almost broke his foot, took nine years of suffering' -- you see what I mean? -- 'and he went through all this here and he came out minus three fingers and four toes, but he had the will to get it, and out of that came this great wonderful creativity of this product after years of testing and breaking your neck and everything, tested on ninety-four hundred women and four hundred and sixty-four elephants and out in the desert in 146-degree temperature Fahrenheit and boy! -- it almost came to the point of giving up because they never thought they could make it . . .' And that's honest fiction. That's why publicity releases, for my sake, for my purpose, you know what I mean, you all know what you can do with it. You can throw it in the wastepaper basket. I didn't mean that."

Clear?

So maybe he didn't flip a nickel at the Automat to determine his fate. Maybe it was a dime. But the fact remains that he did go to work selling nail polish for a Newark, New Jersey, firm called Elka sometime in 1931. His territory was "Greater New York" and soon he had his older brother Joseph quit work at the General Motors assembly plant in Tarrytown to join him.

At first some of their friends and relations looked askance at the nail polish business. They considered it "sissyish." And cosmetics in those days were reserved largely for actresses and whores. What's more, this Elka firm in Newark did not have a great deal of class. There were just two of them at Elka, an older man who owned the place, and his demonstrator, a hunchback. She would go around to beauty shows pushing Elka's polish. "It was pitiful," Martin recalls.

Elka's product, however, was revolutionary. It was opaque. All the other nail polishes on the market were transparent. Charles saw the potential in this difference. The others were made with dyes and were limited to three shades of red -- light, medium, and dark. Revson felt that polish -- "cream enamel," it came to be called -- made with pigment so that it would really cover the nails, and made in a wide variety of shades, could capture the market.

He and Joseph were given a few feet of space in a cousin's lamp factory at 38 West 21 Street (the Revsons were never at a loss for cousins), and the tiny firm of Revson Brothers limped along for a year or so selling and distributing Elka nail enamel to beauty salons around New York. Charles began learning everything he could about nail enamel and about the beauty salons that were his customers. He wouldn't just deliver the product and collect his cash. He would find out what was right about it, what was wrong, and what they liked about competitive products. He would put the stuff on his own nails to get the feel of it and he learned to apply it to others' nails by way of demonstration. He became, in effect, one of the few guys in the locker room who could give a really good manicure.

"Yes," he told a reporter in 1949, "I learned how to put it on for demonstration -- still can. To this day, I try colors on myself. When you gotta learn, you gotta learn."

His ability to immerse himself in a subject was about to pay off. He began to see that the cosmetics industry, such as it was, was run by weak people; and he began to sense its potential. He asked Elka to expand his distributorship to include the entire country. When Elka turned him down, he went out on his own.

Which brings us to Charles Lachman, who had had the good fortune to marry into a small chemical company -- Dresden -- in New Rochelle, New York. Dresden made nail polish for other firms to sell. Lachman was interested in selling the stuff direct to beauty salons under his own label. He had heard about the Revson brothers, and he got in touch with them. Or else, as he remembers it, they were looking for a supplier, had heard of Dresden, and got in touch with him. Either way, it proved to be a very good thing for C. R. Lachman, then thirty-five years old. He and the Revsons agreed to form a separate company -- Revlon -- which would buy its nail enamel from Dresden. The Revsons were able to scrape together $300, for which, it was agreed, they were entitled to half the new company. Lachman would provide his technical expertise, such as it was, and see that Dresden supplied nail enamel to Revlon on credit. But because Revlon collected cash on delivery, Lachman's "financing" never amounted to more than a few thousand dollars.

It was Charles's first, and undoubtedly his worst, big deal. People used to ask Lachman what he did for the company. "I've got a rake," he would say, "and I rake it in." Still, a deal is a deal, and Charles was not one to renege. Many people have called Charles a son of a bitch, but few ever called him a "lying, cheating son of a bitch. "Which is more than can be said for some of the other men who helped-build-America. He lived with his deal with Lachman for a while; and then -- and you can hardly blame him -- he renegotiated it.

Lachman was described in some stories about Revlon as "a brilliant young chemist." Looking back on Revlon's early days, Martin Revson qualifies that description. "He didn't know his ass from a hole in the ground about chemistry," Martin says. Dresden did not have a better nail polish than Elka; what the Dresden deal offered the Revsons was a stake in their own business. Charlie Lachman did not develop any magic formula; in fact, it was his senior partner at Dresden, a chemist named Dr. Taylor Sherwood, who cooked up the enamel to the Revsons' specifications. Dr. Sherwood's mistake was in not wanting to participate in Revlon himself.

Now, if Charlie Lachman was not a brilliant young chemist, he was not a brilliant young marketing man, either. He did not share Charles's instinct for color, for fashion, or for the consumer. Nor was he by any means as driven. As a result, the brash young Revson and his slower-moving senior partner clashed. "To the point," says Martin, "where Lachman was asked to do nothing. After the first year, he did nothing and was put on the shelf. Absolutely nothing."

According to others who were around in the early days, that may be overstating it -- but not by much. Charlie Lachman was a fundamentally agreeable man, and if Charles Revson wanted him to butt out, why fight? For the next thirty-odd years he drew a substantial salary-plus "bonuses" -- and he let Charles make the decisions and do all the work.

Fairly soon, of course, Lachman was smiling broadly. "He was very grateful for his good fortune, I must admit," says Martin. But two of Charles's decisions around 1937 did not sit so well.

The first was his decision to find a new nail enamel supplier. He was not satisfied with the quality of the product coming from Dresden. Charlie Lachman and his wife, Ruth (not to be confused with his second wife, Ruth, or his third wife, Rita), still owned Dresden, and his share in Revlon had not yet made him even his first million (let alone the $100 million or so it came to be worth at its peak) -- so he was miffed. A company called Maas & Waldstein, located like Elka in Newark, was given the business and has kept it ever since.

To make matters worse, it was around this time that Charles said to Lachman, in effect: "We're doing all the work and you've got half the company. We ought to be equal partners." Lachman was persuaded to cut his own share back to a third, so that Charles and Joseph would each have a third. At the same time, however, two classes of stock were created in such a way that Lachman retained 50 percent of the voting rights. He could not be ganged up on.

(Later, Lachman recalls, both he and Joseph wanted to cut young Martin into the company, but Charles, he says, was reluctant to go along. They persuaded him, and in the summer of 1938 each of the one-third partners was cut back to 30 percent, freeing up 10 percent of the company for Martin. But this was done in such a way that Lachman still controlled half the votes. )

It was probably during the discussion about cutting Lachman's share back from a half to a third, though it might have been in connection with some other dispute, that Lachman grabbed the corporate checkbook and went running out the door.

"Dumb schmuck," Charles is reputed to have said, "that's not the business."

Needless to say, Lachman came back. He was not afflicted with the stubborn pride of Martin or Joseph Revson -- which wound up costing them tens of millions. He could bend.

"I was in the company a very short time when Lachman appears in my office," recalls a Revlon administrator from the late forties. "He was vice president of the company, a third owner, and half the voting interest. He comes in and introduces himself. He said, 'I'd like to have a pen for my desk set.' I said, 'I'm not in charge of office supplies, but if I can help you . . .' He said, 'No, but your girl is.' The girl I had inherited as my secretary was apparently in charge of such things. I called her in and said, 'Give Mr. Lachman a pen for his desk set.' She said, 'I will not.' I said, 'You won't?' She said, 'We're not allowed to give pens to executives for desk sets unless they turn in their old pen, and he loses them all the time. So I'm not giving it to him. That's Mr. Joseph's orders.' ("Mr. Joseph," "Mr. Charles," and "Mr. Martin," the brothers were called, plantation style, to avoid confusion. Even after the other two left, it remained "Mr. Charles.") Lachman was standing there listening to all this. I said to her, 'I'll be responsible.' She says to Lachman, 'All right, I'll give you a pen. But don't you lose it again.' People in the office knew he had no authority."

He went on a lot of ski trips, however, and seemed to be having a very nice time. He was seventy-eight in 1975 and going strong on his third pacemaker.

Unlike a silent partner, which is what Charlie Lachman in essence became, an entrepreneur has to work his ass off. He fills eleven jobs himself, he worries about everything, he is driven by a vision, and he is constantly selling different versions of that vision to customers, employees, investors, suppliers -- to himself -- and to anyone else who will listen. Yet the vision he is selling is not quite the same as the vision that drives him. He can endlessly extol the virtues of his product or service, evoking images of a world of whiter washes, fewer cavities, or more brilliant fingernails. And he can be intimately involved, as Charles was, in the creation and the quality of his products. But it is the business, not the product, that obsesses him. He just sells the product; he owns the business. He has a vision, quite simply, of hitting the jackpot and winning, along with money: independence, power, and respect -- the game.

By one account, Charles Revson was "nurtured on Horatio Alger books." Whether or not this is so -- in later life he stuck mainly to paperback Westerns -- it is true that he always wanted to make a lot of money and that he never pretended otherwise. He harbored no fond memories of the simple life in Manchester; he got out of there as fast as he could. He harbored no left-wing sympathies, either. His thoughts ran more to the practical than to the intellectual. Looking out the window early one Depression morning as limousine after limousine passed by on the way from Westchester to Manhattan, he was not repelled by such opulence in the midst of widespread national suffering, as some of his peers might have been. Instead, he said, determinedly: "Some day I’ll have a Cadillac limousine and be driven by my chauffeur to my office."

In the meantime, he and Joseph would take the subway from West 164 Street down to the drab, $25-a-month room they had rented at 15 West 44 Street, a few doors down from the Harvard Club and diagonally across from The New Yorker.

Charles would carry a soft black sample case full of nail enamel from beauty salon to beauty salon while Joseph remained in the office, keeping meticulous records, watching every penny and paperclip, and seeing that Revlon bills were paid on time. If Joseph told a vendor he would have a check by Monday morning, he could bet his life it would be there. "His words are bonds," the yearbook had said of Joseph.

Martin was still working for the brokerage firm of E. A. Pierce, a forerunner of Merrill, Lynch, and did not quit his $35-a-week job to become Revlon's sales manager until 1935. So the only other Revlon employee for much of 1933, not including the boys' mother, who would come down to help out, was a shipping clerk by the name of George Hastell. Hastell came to Revlon fresh from high school and was still with the firm in 1975, a manager in Revlon's large Edison, New Jersey, factory.

George Hastell

When I came looking for a job, in June of 1933, I remember walking into the lobby with a bewildered look on my face, and a nice young fellow says to me, "You looking for Revlon? Take the elevator up." That was Mr. Charles, though I didn't know it at the time. He was going out to make calls.

I went upstairs and I met Mr. Joseph. There were some other young men there waiting for an interview, also. Mr. Joseph was giving everybody a typing test. He dictated slowly [Joseph did everything slowly], so I was able to type it. Then he asked some other questions and got on the phone to the employment agency and said, "I've decided to take so-and-so." I got up and started to leave and he said, "Come back, come back." I said, "Why?" He said, "I'm hiring you." I said, "But that's not my name." And that's how I got hired. He had gotten the names confused.

I got home and told my wife and parents that I had a job. They said, "Great! Where?" I said, "With the Revlon Company. They make nail polish." My wife said, "Nail polish?" It was a

dirty word. She never used nail polish or lipstick or anything else in those days.

But I started working, and I had to get there at seven o'clock every morning. Mr. Joseph would open the door and then we would work and leave around five or six. They started me out at $7 a week and said if I worked out they would raise it to $9 after a month, which they did. Then the N.R.A. came in and everybody had to be paid $15 a week.

The office was very small. You walked through the door and there was like an eight-by-eight reception area, with a desk and a typewriter. Behind a partition was a room with two tables, a telephone and a window at the end that looked out on the street. When the four of us were in there -- Charles, Joseph, Mrs. Revson, and me -- it was crowded.

Our "warehouse" was a metal file cabinet. We had very little stock. We didn't make it ourselves; it came in to us from Dresden in eight-ounce bottles, and we would pour it into quarter-ounce bottles. You held the bottles in your hand and poured from one to the other without spilling. The one thing about nail enamel then was that it had a base, unlike the other nail polishes you could see through, and you had to keep this base in circulation. You couldn't always get it off the bottom, but Mr. Charles taught me how to shake a bottle to get it off. [Mr. Hastell raised both hands, as if held at gunpoint, and then shook them without moving his elbows, as if dancing the hokey-pokey.]

After we filled the bottles and made up the packages, I would go down to the post office. They used to advertise in a beauty shop magazine, in which you sent in sixty cents and we would mail out a bottle of nail enamel. Or we would send it out C.O.D. My first day I came down to the post office loaded with packages and got in line, and when I got up to the window the man says to me, "Oh, you're from Revlon." I said, "Yes." "Another new kid, huh?" I said, "Yes, why?" I thought I was the only new kid. He said, "You're not going to last there. Nobody does. They always have a turnover. They work you too hard." Apparently, I was the third or fourth shipping clerk they had had that year.

Another job of mine was to deliver. I had a little black suitcase in which I'd pack the bottles, and I used to travel around on the subway or the trolley car and deliver. Everything was C.O.D.: if I made twelve deliveries, I'd come back with something like $12 or $15. I would usually stop and have a sandwich for a nickel. They had bars where you could go in and get a beer and a sandwich made at the bar right in front of you.

Mr. Joseph worked with me in the office. Mr. Charles was always out selling. Their mother worked in the office, too. She would drop in and help out, filling bottles, putting labels on them -- all that sort of thing. Their father would drop in, also, but he didn't take an active interest. You could see he was proud of his sons because they had a going business, though.

Then we started to get busy, and I could see day after day the business kept growing. They got so busy they asked me if I knew anybody who wanted a job, and I said, "Sure." They said, "If you know some nice young guy, bring him in." I brought one in and this is the way it went, bringing in more and more people as we got bigger and bigger.

In that tiny building, 15 West 44 Street, there was a furrier called Sally Studios, and they were growing, too. And pretty soon there became a competition between the two companies of who was going to take up most of the building. Finally, we got so big that we said, "You keep the building and we'll move." And we moved to 125 West 45 Street, above Caruso's Restaurant.

["I used to manage that building," says New York real estate consultant Henry Rice, "and when they moved in, in 1936, they were taking a big leap forward: they were taking a half-floor in a fifty-foot building, for which they were incurring a rent obligation of two hundred dollars a month. It was a very serious question as to whether they were going in over their heads. And in a year or a year-and-a-hall's time they expanded to five floors.

"Charles was very affable and charming then, and somewhat . . . servile would not be the word, but he went out of his way to be pleasant. I was important. I was the landlord. When my wife would come into the building, everybody fawned on her. She could never leave without being laden with gift nail polish, gift lipstick, gift anything. Everybody was very nice in those days -- they were poor.

"I had staggered the lease expirations on the different floors over about three and a half years, to lock them into the building. They couldn't very well move out half a floor at a time. And when I left the building, and a new landlord came in, he asked me how I could have been so sloppy. He said the first thing he had done was write a new lease to get all the expirations together. I thought to myself, 'You schmuck!' "]

We must have had twenty or thirty people in the factory by the time we moved to Forty-fifth Street, and five or six people in the office. It just grew continuously. It never stopped. On Forty-fourth Street we had no machinery whatsoever. On Forty-fifth we had two machines that I recall -- old machines bought secondhand. One was a makeshift filling machine, so we wouldn't have to fill the bottles one at a time by hand. We put the bottles on wooden trays under a hopper full of four or five gallons of nail enamel. You pushed a pedal and the filling spouts would open up; when the bottles were filled, you'd lift up on the pedal and go to the next row.

And we got a labeling machine. At first we had to put labels on by hand. We had one of those ceramic rollers with water in it that you passed the labels over to wet the glue, and then you positioned the labels on the bottles and the boxes. The dexterity of the people doing this was amazing, that they could put them on straight all the time. If we had one that was slightly crooked, we'd scrape it off with a razor blade. But at Forty-fifth Street we got this big old-fashioned machine that would whirl and whirl around and a big arm would come down and put glue on and then come back up again.

When we moved the factory up to [525 West] Fifty-second Street [in 1938], we started getting things like conveyor belts. That's where we did all our assembling. That's when we started with our Christmas sets. We'd make a manicure set with bottles of nail enamel, a tweezer, an orange stick, an emory board . . .

In the early days, I remember particularly Charles always having nail polish on his fingernails, all different colors -- a different shade on each nail. [This saved the expense of printing up a color chart.] Every time a nail polish came in, I'd see him sitting there, putting it on. Then all the girls in the office would have to wear the nail enamel. Same thing with the factory girls: he put the nail enamel on them and said, "You wear that." When we started with the assembly line operations, this got to be a problem. When a girl was called upstairs, it would disrupt the line.

He was particularly fussy about trimming the applicator brushes. He wanted them even, no straggly bristles on the sides, perfect. He made a fetish of perfection. He wanted perfection and quality. And even then we were throwing batches out if they weren't right.

Joe was very fussy about things, too. He would come into the plant and walk up and down and if he saw something on the floor, he'd give you a lecture. It was like a colonel coming along with a white glove looking for dust – I remember in the Bronx factory he actually did that. Everybody thought he was too finicky. He was finicky about things like that and Charles was finicky about the product.

In the early days, Charles and Joseph seemed to be very equal. It wasn't until later that Charles began to dominate. They each took a different area of responsibility... Charles was always the salesman, Joseph was the controller, the bookkeeper, the plant manager. Charles had the vision; he always knew that we would grow bigger and bigger. Joseph was a restraining influence on Charles. He was more straitlaced than Charles.

I remember one of the company parties where we had a bubble dancer who used to dance with a big balloon. I don't think Joseph knew what kind of entertainment we were going to have. But all of a sudden this bubble dancer comes out with the balloon and is dancing with hardly anything on, and he was horrified. But Charles -- he wanted to go up and dance with the bubble dancer. Joseph restrained him. As I recall, Charles was out on the dance floor . . . actually sat on the floor and watched her dance.

[Charles liked interesting parties. He would hire mind readers, magicians, graphologists, organize Bingo games -- anything, it seemed, to keep from having to stand around talking to people.]

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