-- Charles Revson

Though he had failed with the Chicago sales-motivation outfit he briefly represented, Revson apparently learned something about selling and about motivating salesmen from the experience. He was not the smooth-talking, carnation-lapeled hero of The Music Man, but his enthusiasm was equally great, and in his youth he cut quite a figure. "Charles personally went out and did the selling," a long-time associate asserts, "personally got the distribution, personally slept with half the girls around the country to get counter space for Revlon. [When he decided to marry Ancky, he had to dispatch a top sales executive to Chicago to break the news to the manager of the Marshall Field's beauty salon -- a key account. He didn't have the courage to face her himself.] He was very human, very charming, very witty, smoked three packs of cigarettes a day, and drank bourbon neat. His charisma is what built Revlon -- and the rest of the industry as well. All this other stuff . . . his impeccable behavior, dark suits, not laughing, not drinking, not smoking, being very staid and proper and so on . . . all that came later, after the company was of a very sizable dimension."

Although most of them go unrecorded, Charles Revson had some wild times in the thirties -- and the forties and the fifties and the sixties, right up until the time he married Lyn. "Charlie was terrific," says one of his first salesmen. "We used to travel together sometimes and get laid every night and have a fantastic time."

Instead of loosening up as he became more successful, he stiffened. Instead of becoming more comfortable with the big world outside, he became more introverted.

Martin recalls that once, around 1936, Charles became so distracted by an affair he was having that for a period of months he neglected the business. It never happened again. And that once around the same time he and Charles were walking down Fifty-seventh Street on a beautiful day and Charles said, "You know, I wouldn't mind going to a baseball game."

"You're going to a baseball game? How can you do that?" Martin asked incredulously.

"Why? There's nothing wrong with that," Charles said. That exchange has always stuck in Martin's mind, he says, "because of how the man's attitude was at that time, and how it stiffened as time went on."

Almost everyone has tried selling something at one time or another -- Girl Scout cookies or Christmas cards, yearbook ads or encyclopedias -- and the experience for most people is unsettling. It is lonely, it is embarrassing, and the inevitable rejections are deadening. Tough enough when, in your sales pitch, you can blame your pushiness on a "good cause," like the yearbook; or when you are backed by a well-known name; or when you are calling on people you know; or when you have a supportive sales manager helping to guide you along. But try going cold, a young Jew from Manchester, New Hampshire, on the shortish, thinnish side, into beauty salon after beauty salon where nobody knows you, nobody's heard of you or your product; and try selling it at a premium price, cash on delivery, in the depths of the Depression. Those first few years took the kind of motivation few people have. If Revson hadn't had three big plusses going for him, he might never have made much of a name for himself. But, first, he really did have a much better product (though where had it gotten Elka?); second, he was an attractive young man calling, for the most part, on women (bringing out sexual instincts in some and motherly instincts in others); and third, if he didn't keep selling, how was he going to eat?

The Revson family was getting by all right up in Washington Heights, but it was hardly Fat City. You will recall Charles waiting for two hours at Seligman & Latz to collect his $48, and not having a complete suit to wear. Well, this image is corroborated by another: Charles would occasionally visit the home of another of his cousins, Al Katz, in Philadelphia. Katz was Revlon's first commissioned salesman, then first sales manager. When Charles visited the Katzes, he would have to stay in bed while they took his one suit out to be pressed. "That's a true story," says Sol Levine, an early Revson confidant.

The lean years paid off. Beauty salons that tried the product reordered. Word spread within the beauty trade and among women. Soon Charles was hiring salesmen, attending beauty shows, and signing up beauty supply jobbers to distribute Revlon products in other parts of the country.

Andre Goutal, a Frenchman who thought in French but spoke in English, was given Westchester and Fairfield counties as his exclusive territory -- provided he maintain a minimum order level of $60 a month. This agreement was struck in May of 1932, just months after the Revlon partnership was formed. Goutal worked out so well that he became, for a while, Revlon's national sales manager. But at first everything was done on a modest scale: "I have a letter dated November 23, 1933," says Mr. Goutal, now comfortably retired in Cape Cod. "It is signed by Joseph Revson, and he's squawking about two dollars."

Charles could not afford a booth at the 1933 beauty show. A young man he had met while calling on beauty salons, Robert Hoffman, inventor of the Hoffman professional hair drier system, gave him a corner of his own. Charles set up a card table and painted all the nails he could. He collected cash in a cigar box from the sales that resulted. Later, as Revlon grew and the Hoffman hair drier system ran into stiff competition, Hoffman went to work selling for Charles Revson. But for a while he was one of several more established men in the beauty field who took a liking to Charles and tried to help him along (and then wound up working for him).

Hoffman remembers going down to Atlanta to attend the beauty show there. "We drove down to Washington in my old Ford, and took the train from there," he says. "While we were in Washington, he stayed with one of my cousins, and I stayed with another. (Neither one had enough room for both of us, and we couldn't afford a hotel.) He stayed on the couch. The next day, my uncle, who had a potato-chip plant, gave us a huge tin of potato chips to take along on the train. When we got to Atlanta, Charles checked us into the best suite in the hotel, to make an impression . . . but he had no cash. He believed in the best even when he was broke. He was buying made-to-order shoes long before he could afford to. [One of the first tenets of salesmanship: Look successful.]

"He wired Joe for money, and Joe wired back just one word: 'No.'

"We had to entertain, so we went out and bought the cheapest bottle of whiskey we could find, and all our entertaining was done in this big suite with a giant can of potato chips in the middle of the floor."

Charles was the smartest, most dynamic man at the show, all of twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old. People gravitated to him. The phone in their hotel suite never stopped ringing; the women loved him. The only thing that put people off a bit -- even then -- was that, as Hoffman recalls, "He was the most miserable eater I have ever seen. He would think nothing of sending eggs back three or four times. You know: 'I ordered two-minute eggs, and these are two-and-a-half-minute eggs.' And he would make a scene sometimes." Joseph was the same way. A certain fussiness, meticulousness, attention to detail seemed to run in the family. It was probably inherited from the Major.

At any rate, there was still the matter of the hotel bill to be cleared up, not to mention the train fare he had gambled away at a series of convivial late-night poker games. Joseph had been careful to give his brother a series of future-dated checks, one for each of the weeks he was to be on the road, and he wouldn't send more money. (Without Joseph's small-mindedness and conservatism, Revlon might not have made it through those first difficult years.) Charles managed to borrow some money from another of his mentors at the beauty show, a man named Mike Sager.

Sager used to travel around the country in his Chevrolet selling cosmetics for Hyman & Hyman. He met "Charlie" -- as the real old-timers knew him -- at a beauty show and, like Hoffman, helped him get in to see the right jobbers. In Boston, Sager saw Charlie sitting on the stairs outside Edward Tower & Company, on Washington Street. He had been waiting for an hour. "I took him right in," Sager says. "I did that with him all over." Eventually, Sager left Hyman & Hyman for Revlon. For a while he had the entire West Coast as his territory. He also helped the company find new products to copy. "Copy everything and you can't go wrong," he remembers Charles telling him. That way -- and it was basically Charles's formula for forty-three years -- you let the competitors do the groundwork and make the mistakes. And when they hit with something good, you make it better, package it better, advertise it better, and bury them.

Another salesman who traveled with Charles was Jack Price. To conserve funds, one of them would check in and give the bellboy all their luggage; the other would wait a few minutes and then sneak up to the "single" room. "Charlie never went to bed without putting lipstick on his lips and nail polish on his nails," Price says. "He would leave a call with the desk to wake him at two and at four and at six to see how it was wearing." A small booth at the Midwest Beauty Show, in Chicago's Sherman Hotel in the spring of 1934, resulted in Revson's first big sale. As he told the story to a trade paper years later, with some stilted editing and perhaps just a touch of honest fiction: *

"I started my sales talk by showing the prospect how to apply our cream nail polish, then a new type. Before the week was out, I was teaching beauty shop operators and clerks how to demonstrate and use the polish. That group grew so big I had to rent the booth next to ours, and that additional space made my exhibit larger than our entire plant.

"One afternoon, when I had seven or eight pupils demonstrating, the manager of the beauty salon at Marshall Field & Company stopped by, watched our practical schooling, and from the size of the operation evidently got the idea that we were a big concern. She gave me an order that nearly exhausted our stock. [Later,] I dropped into Marshall Field's and told the salon manager we always followed up our orders and asked could I be of further service . . . She asked about other colors in our line, and I pulled out my order book.

"'Your company must be a pretty big concern to hold a man over here just to service accounts,' she remarked as she placed an order for a dozen of one number.

"'Not as large as we hope to be,' I replied.

"As she added another sizable amount on another color, she said, 'This, I am sure, will not delay shipment of the earlier order, for you must have an ample stock.'

"'Our shipping department has never had to miss a shipping date yet,' I answered, praying that Joseph could live up to that promise.

"'Didn't the orders at the show overload your facilities?' she asked while adding another item to the order.

"'No, not necessarily. We have a plentiful supply of raw materials. We try to keep turning that over fast, and the factory is geared to handle anything and everything that comes in,' I replied, wondering how Joseph was going to package and ship show orders alone, not counting this one.

"'Next time I'm in New York I'd like to go through your plant and meet your chemist,' was her clincher as she added three dozen of another item to the order, darn near filling that sheet.

"'Yes, do that, but I hope it's not too soon. We are working out an expansion program and the place will be cluttered up for a while.' Of course, I hoped her trip would be delayed.

"I sent the order to Joseph by wire. It was the biggest we'd ever had. [Around $400, by most accounts.]

"He wired back: 'Is this an error in transmission? I couldn't fill it in weeks.' I wired, 'The order is correct.' Then I caught the train back to New York.

"The last of that order went over to the post office at midnight Sunday. Joseph and I dragged our weary bones for a sleep around the clock. We hadn't seen a bed in nearly a week. But we had made our promised shipping date."

And they all lived happily ever after. In fact, there was another big coup at that 1934 beauty show. It was at that show that Charles met A. C. Bailey, of the Bailey Beauty Supply Company in Chicago, which has been distributing Revlon products in that city ever since. Bailey doesn't remember Charles's renting the adjacent booth and setting up shop; he remembers Charles selling alone in a tiny booth a tray of five shades of enamel at $1.25. But he went with Charles nonetheless.

"I went with him," Bailey says, "because I had checked with some of the finest beauty shops in the east, like Michael of the Waldorf, and found that this polish was incredible. It was chip-proof and had more stay-on power, had more gloss and luster, the colors were beautiful, and the formula was just terrific. We were carrying at that time about five brands of nail polish. Blue Bird, Chen-Yu, Glazo and a couple of others. We threw everything else out and carried only Revlon."

Forty-three years later, Mr. Bailey appreciated the chance to characterize Charles Revson: "The most charming man that ever lived, the most dynamic man that ever lived, the greatest salesman that ever drew breath; very charitable, very knowledgeable, a dynamic personality, and a great human being." Which suggests that Charles acted differently with people who bought from him than with people who worked for him. And that he was easier to love from a thousand miles away than from down the hall. But Bailey's warm feelings are understandable. Revlon built jobbers like A. C. Bailey. The demand among beauty salons for Revlon nail enamel became so great, to the virtual exclusion of any other brand, that the jobber in each city fortunate enough to have the Revlon line was almost assured of success. And only one jobber would be franchised in any area. Many beauty salons would simply refer to this jobber as "the Revlon jobber." As Revlon grew and added more products, so did the jobber. Even so, many of them hated Revson. He pushed them for all he could.

In 1935, Martin joined Revlon full-time as sales manager. If Joseph was the old-fashioned elementary-school teacher, explaining everything very slowly, twice, and putting a great premium on neatness . . . Martin was the demanding but popular high-school football coach, who "actually believed all the things he said," as one incredulous associate put it. Martin had many of Charles's dynamic qualities ("The Jewish Cary Grant," they used to call him), but not the brilliance -- or the mean streak. Martin was more ebullient, would shout, throw things out the window, pound the table; Charles never raised his voice. Yet people feared Charles; they liked Martin.

When Revlon signed on Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn 'as its ad agency, Martin coined a slogan: "Go, go, go! With B.B.D. and O.!" tie would ask his salesmen, "Are you marking time or making time?" And he would tell them, "You're the greatest, Revlon's the greatest, so get in there and fight!"

"Tough traveling these days," he wrote one of his salesmen from a hotel in Memphis during the war, "but we Revlon guys can take it. Expected to be in New Orleans today but my spirits are high, ah those spirits." A handwritten note to Jack Price, circa 1938: "We've come a long way together, kid, (how well you and I remember the old days when people wondered how we ate and traveled just selling Revlon) and we'll go a long way farther. When you first came with us we were puffing along proudly on less than $100,000 [sales]; and then before we knew it, we were over the hump, yes, sir, $1,000,000; and it won't be long now before we'll be hitting $5,000,000. That's us, kid, always feeling proud, whether it's $50,000 or $5,000,000. Nothing can stop us."

He went so far as to name his first son "Peter Jeffrey Revlon Revson"-a name Peter hated until the day he died.

"I traveled all over the country with Martin and he was fantastic," says ad man Norman Norman. "It was our job to give sales presentations to department stores. We'd go to a city, then only a struggling cosmetic company doing twenty-three or twenty-five million . . . we were pretty exciting already but by no means the largest thing that ever happened. We'd take the biggest suite in a hotel and meet with nobody but the president of the store. It didn't matter what chain, we met the president. 'I'm Martin Revson, V.P. of the company. I'm entitled to see you. We're going to be the biggest cosmetic company in the country and I'm here to work out with you the details of how that's going to happen.' That was the way he would talk. He'd say: 'I've been downstairs and you've only given us eleven feet of space and you've got twenty-nine feet for Charles of the Ritz. That's wrong. They're not going to be in first place. Now, you tell me the timetable you want; we'll do whatever is necessary to get there.' First the president would laugh, then he'd take him seriously, and before you knew it, an hour and a half later they were working out the details . . . Martin was one of the most brilliant sales managers I've ever seen in my life and it was all homegrown and natural. I don't think he ever took a course."

Martin developed "Psycho-Revlons," where salesmen would act out selling situations in front of a group and have their performances criticized. At the time, this sort of role-playing exercise was novel. Psycho-Revlons even became the subject of an S. J. Perelman New Yorker parody. (Charles would not subject himself to group criticism, but in the early days he did keep a recording device in his apartment to practice pitches and pep talks.)

Martin's sales force quickly grew to cover the whole country. By 1937, they were selling to department stores, and then drugstores, as well as beauty salons. It was an aggressive sales force; slackers were not tolerated. The pressure from the top came right down through the ranks to the salesman. One district sales manager required a lagging salesman to call in every two hours to report on his progress until his performance improved. And since drugstores were often open until ten at night, salesmen were expected to work very long days, if necessary, to meet their quotas.

Periodically, other cosmetics firms would attempt to encroach on Revlon's territory, and competitive battles would ensue. The Revlon salesmen were expected to win. If a Chen-Yu nail enamel color chart somehow walked out of a store in a salesman's briefcase . . . well, it could always be replaced by a Revlon color chart. If the bottle caps on some Chen-Yu nail enamel were loosened a bit and the enamel hardened . . . well, the store, or the consumer, would know not to buy an inferior brand again. If, in an attempt to secure counter space, a salesman should spread his arms out, accidentally sweeping the competitive product off either end of the counter onto the floor . . . well, the salesmen were authorized to buy up the damaged merchandise at the retailer's cost and replace it with Revlon product. And if there were a particularly intractable marketing problem, Mickey Soroko might be sent in to take care of it.

Mark D. Soroko -- the strong-arm man, the problem-solver, the enforcer, the house dick. A character lifted straight from the pages of Damon Runyan. Soroko was in some ways the most valuable player in the company, after Charles, for twenty-five years. The son of orthodox Russian Jews, he grew up milking cows in Chelsea, Massachusetts, and almost finished the eighth grade. He was a process server, tracking down people to serve with subpoenas. He ran a collection agency, frightening or threatening people into paying off their debts. He was the kind of guy, he acknowledges, who would go out of his way for a fight.

Mickey met Charles through a cousin -- the mind boggles at all Charles's cousins -- and then, when he was going through a messy divorce and was down on his luck, in the midthirties, he moved in with the Revson boys, who were sharing a suite at the Cameron Hotel on Eighty-sixth Street. Martin and Charles slept in one bedroom, Joe slept in the other, and Mickey slept on the couch. Joe snored. At first Mickey was reluctant when they asked him to join Revlon. "I thought it was a feminine business," he says. "I was surprised later on when I found out it was one of the roughest businesses you can have. Especially due to the fact that outside of Helena Rubinstein, who was a questionable Jew [less than gung-ho, that is], we were the only Jews in the business. And we were not welcome."

If the beauty business was a "pretty rough one," it was partly because Mickey Soroko was in it. Mickey was the kind to shout and threaten and slam his fist on the table . . . even, some said, to carry a gun (though not to use it) -- or, at least, to show up on occasion with someone who did carry a gun. Yet most people could not help liking him.

Fiercely loyal to Charles and to the company, he would always wait around at night until Charles left the office. And Charles, though undoubtedly a little afraid of Mickey, recognized his indispensability and rewarded him appropriately. He made a gentleman of Mickey: Hand-tailored suits, Havana cigars (smoked all the way down to the stubs), and yellow Cadillacs that were his trademark in Larchmont. As a final gesture, in 1971 Charles made him a member of Revlon's board of directors.

Charles liked street fighters, liked to think of himself as one, and had his man in Mickey Soroko. No one knew exactly how Mickey did what he did -- there were plenty of rumors -- but he got things done. Presumably, those people he couldn't scare into doing what he wanted he could cajole, and those people he couldn't cajole he could pay off. He had signing privileges on a special Revlon bank account. And no Revlon controller was about to question any of his expense vouchers. In one town ages ago there was a problem with fire regulations, which would not permit the sale of nail enamel, a flammable substance. A couple of weeks later, one of the fire trucks went around delivering the nail enamel that had been held up. How did this happen? Mickey won't say.

During the war, he managed to land some sizable government contracts. And somehow Revlon had an easier time than its competitors in obtaining the raw materials and packaging materials it needed for its cosmetics.

Mickey's charm and his lavish entertaining endeared him to a most remarkable assortment of people. People in government, detectives, dermatologists, prominent Jews. It was Godfather-like. Trivial example: A Revlon executive was in a rush to get a driver's license, but failed the test. Someone told him to see Mickey. Mickey sent him down to see a friend of his, who turned out to be the Commissioner of Sanitation. The Commissioner of Sanitation walked him over to the Commissioner of Motor Vehicles, who put him in line, got him a test, waived the thirty-day waiting period, and got him the license on the spot.

As for Mickey's own driving habits, he used to park those yellow Cadillacs anywhere. If he got a parking ticket, he would look around for another Cadillac to pin it to, and very frequently it would get paid. If it didn't, well, Mickey had his own way of living and he always managed to come out ahead somehow.

He was responsible for all Revlon's product liability cases, which is why he became so thick with the dermatologists. They could alert him to problems; they would be loath to testify against Revlon in court. (A Revlon base-coat called "Ever-On" in the early days was so effective that it may have been responsible for the devastation of a great many fingernails and perhaps even one amputation. The product was withdrawn, of course, and Mickey went dashing around the country settling what might otherwise have been scores of costly lawsuits. Without Mickey, Revlon might then and there have gone the way of Bon Vivant vichyssoise.) He was responsible for dealing with the Food and Drug Administration. He was responsible at first for labor negotiations. And for internal security. And for enforcement of Revlon's selective distribution policies -- cracking down on black market operations in Revlon merchandise. Anything that needed doing where you might have to get your hands a little dirty, Mickey stood ready to do.

Clearly then, despite Revlon's reputation as a one-man success story, Charles had some invaluable help. In the early years, brother Martin and Mickey Soroko were among the major contributors. Others came on board as the company grew. And there were also a great, great many minor contributors.

One such was David Kreloff, who in 1975 was completing his thirty-sixth year of service to the company; about as loyal a soldier as one could find. Kreloff was around early enough to see Revlon in its adolescent stage.

Dave Kreloff

I love my work and the company, and I don't let anyone cheat Revlon. I don't let anyone throw things away in the wastebasket, for example, if they can be used. It hurts. It's a waste of money and ridiculous. That's my outlook.

When I first joined the company in March of 1939, Revlon was already substantial. They had enamels and the manicure products, but they did not have lipstick. They came out with lipstick in 1940, and it was unbelievably exciting. I was in the mail department and it was a six-day week, until noon on Saturday. I had a desk on the same floor where they had a small lab room, although the real lab was up at the factory on West Fifty-second Street. Charles would spend his time in this little room with Lillian Dunn, and his whole life was nail enamel.

[Lillian Dunn recalls sitting across the manicurist's table from Revson, applying nail enamel to his nails, and he to hers. "In the early days," she says, "we worked pretty much seven days a week. He taught me how to put it on, how to look at it, feel it, evaluate it -- how it flowed, how it dried, how it set, how it wore. He taught me to use it as a professional and to misuse it as a consumer -- I had to know both. And for months, hours at a time, he just taught me nail enamel."]

I wasn't in the mailroom long. I'm always thinking of ways to improve things, and I went to the controller and said I wanted to make some suggestions but I didn't know who to talk to . . . and a week later I was made head of the mail department. And six months after that I was brought up into the sales department.

Whenever they had any function, a show or anything, I went to it. I remember at the Statler Hilton there was the International Beauty Show every year. Charles would be in a booth with his products. I would come on Saturdays and Sundays to help set up the booth. That wasn't my job, but I wanted to get into the display department. Charles had brought out Aquamarine hand cream, and he had the lab bring down a stainless Steel bowl full of it. They also brought down stainless steel spatulas, and everyone who came near us was supposed to get a sample on their hand. And I was helping him do this, so this is how he got to know me.

In those days, Charles would hold a sales meeting every Saturday on the fifth floor of our offices, at 125 West 45 Street. The conference room was right next to the mailroom on that floor. He would come in in the morning, take off his jacket, roll up his sleeves, and stay in there for the whole day. The meetings lasted all day. When I finished my work I would go in there and do whatever they wanted me to do. I used to run over to the Gaiety Deli on Forty-sixth Street, off Seventh Avenue, and get them all sandwiches.

He was the greatest salesman ever. Martin was the sales manager, but Charles was the salesman. I'd listen to him talk about why you can be successful and why you should be successful and how you can be. He always said you had to have the will to win. And you couldn't help yourself -- you had to believe him. I watched him sell his bottle of nail enamel to two department store buyers one day. They just couldn't resist him. He didn't scream or badger; he told them what the future would be. That the whole fashion world was going to come along, and that this is what it would be like. They believed him and he was right.

He said one day that he would be known as the king in the fragrance world -- and at that time he didn't even have a fragrance. Aquamarine is the first fragrance he came out with, many, many years later. [And now Revlon's got Norell and Intimate and Ciara and Cerissa and Charlie.]

They say he's a murderer, he fires people, he insults them and so forth . . . okay, he's a businessman, and 90 percent of the people he murdered deserved it. But he's really a very warm guy. He was never aloof; it was easy to be with him. The last fifteen years it hasn't been easy to be with him because he's on a different level in the world.

When those Saturday sales meetings were over, then he liked a good time and a lot of fun. I think this was at the Commodore Hotel, one time they took the mattresses off the twin beds, put one on top of the other, and they were shooting dice. Throwing dice against the headboard. That day Charles came in with a brand-new, ivory-color suit, tropical suit, and everybody was teasing him about the suit, and he was so proud of it. (This was before he got into the dark suit bit.)

I guess everyone had a cocktail too much and in those days they had an inkwell on the desk with a pointed pen. They didn't have ballpoint pens in those days. I don't know if Mickey [Soroko] was winning or losing, but he picked up the inkwell and went over to Charles and threw it all over his new ivory suit. [He was probably losing.] Charles just stood there, looking at the mess all over his suit. He didn't say a word and he went into the bathroom and he took the wastebasket in the bathroom, filled it with the toilet bowl water, and just poured it all over Mickey.

That started it, and they started to throw things at each other. Food . . . whatever was in the room. I'm not sure of the figure, but I do think the hotel bill was $1,700 to restore the room. This was around 1941. I remember hiding under a bed for the next half hour because the lamps were flying, they were unscrewing the light bulbs and throwing them at each other . . .**

And Joseph’ s reaction when he got the hotel bill?

Not good.

Can you remember anything about Joseph?

Well, if something was on the floor, even a piece of paper, he'd have a meeting and make a big fuss about it. He would make an issue over it. I remember rubber bands. But he was a nice guy . . .

The Revlon Company would have a Christmas party every year for the entire company, five or six hundred people, at the Biltmore or the Roosevelt. When we moved to the Squibb Building [in 1943], they had beautiful showrooms, very plush, and the parties would be held there. Reuben's, which was down in the building, would come up and set up the food and the tables and so on . . . very nice parties. And then the parties were stopped. And in my opinion they were stopped because at the last party, Joseph Revson, who was a rather straight guy, was walking to one of the showrooms with a drink in his hand, and an employee, a girl who weighed about 170 or 180 pounds, maybe had had too many drinks and suddenly leaped off a chair and threw her arms around him, spilling her drink all over him, and his drink all over him. And that was the last party we ever had.

What about Martin?

Well, I remember one day I was sitting in on a sales meeting he had called . . . I was pinch-hitting for my boss, Lester Herzog... and Martin was wearing a checkered shirt. This was about ten years after the ivory-suit incident I described to you, and Charles was now wearing only dark suits. So Martin's door opened and Charles walked in. And you could see it and you couldn't: a little flicker of change came over Martin because big brother was looking over his shoulder, Charles being as critical as he is. As Charles walked in Martin kept talking, but his tone had changed. Less self-confident. And Charles just wandered around making everyone feel totally uncomfortable.

* "The Sale I Never Forgot." Printers' Ink, September 15, 1950.