-- John Revson

But war broke out, and travel plans were again up-ended. Worse, the flow of funds from abroad was interrupted, and the twenty-five-year-old ex-countess found herself modeling for Saks Fifth Avenue.

She and some other models were returning from a photo session at the 1939 World's Fair one March day when they stopped at a beauty show being held in the Sixty-fifth Street armory. While waiting for one of the models to have her picture taken, Johanna Catharina Christina de Knecht, who spoke four languages (if you included English, which there was no overwhelming reason to do), was approached by a kinky-haired gentleman who introduced himself as Lester Herzog. He invited her to have her nails done at the Revlon booth. Ancky Christina, as she was known for modeling purposes, accepted.

"The first time I saw her," Charles recalled ten years later, "she had the wrong shade of lipstick. She needed an education and I had a lot of trouble with her." Perhaps -- but he was taken with her nonetheless. He asked her out for the evening. In fact, he took eight or ten people out on the town that night, as he often would in those days (many of them buyers), darting into one nightclub for a drink or two and then out to another and another and another-and another. "I said to myself, 'This man must be rolling in money. He's crazy!'" Ancky recalls.

Charles took Ancky home. "He gave me his card and said, 'Call me.' And that was the beginning, I vood say."

At first, though Charles seemed like "a very nice man, very dynamic," it was really the opportunity of modeling for Revlon that interested Ancky. "It was a working arrangement, you might say." (Ancky was neither the first model nor the last to have such an arrangement with Charles.) But over a period of about a year -- and a great many American Beauty roses, which were his trademark, three dozen at a clip -- Ancky began seeing less and less of Phillips Holmes, a movie actor she thought drank too much, and more and more of Charles Revson.

Sitting on the veranda of her magnificent Palm Beach home, a few doors down from Estee Lauder's place, fifteen years divorced from Charles but in love with him still, Ancky recalled the unorthodox way he went about wooing her:

"Charles kept on saying, 'I'm never going to get married, I'm never going to get married.' So one day after about six months I said to him, 'Charles, I'm not getting any younger, you're never going to get married, it's been nice knowing you, we had a marvelous time -- think we've got to say bye-bye.'

"So he kept on saying, 'I'm never going to get married.' So I said, finally, good-bye. And we got married four days later.

"We nearly didn't, though, because I remember Charles coming up to the apartment I was sharing with some other girls, an enormous apartment on Fifth Avenue . . . one of my friends, Gloria Swanson, is living there now . . . and he didn't want me to keep anything I had. My clothes, made in Paris; my jewelry. He said, 'No, give this away.' He was more or less the kind of person, I vood say, who wanted you to come naked to the party. He just wanted me to break completely with my old life, I suppose. He didn't even want me to keep my jewelry -- it was amazing.''

The wedding was held on October 26, 1940, in a judge's chambers in New York. Charles was thirty-four. During the course of the ceremony, he started to laugh. Heh, heh. "He wasn't laughing purposely," Martin recalls, "or making fun of the ceremony -- he was laughing nervously." But Judge Eder didn't know that. He departed from the traditional text long enough to remind the groom of "the seriousness of marriage."

Marriage was not Charles Revson's forte; he was not entirely enthusiastic about the concept. No doubt this was partially the result of his first one. Indeed, when Charles and Ancky went for their marriage license and Charles was asked by the clerk for the name of his first wife, Charles -- though he readily admitted there had been a first wife -- simply could not remember her name. Ancky had to supply it for him.

After the wedding itself there was a big reception that Charles had wanted to hold at Bill's Gay Nineties, his favorite night spot. "Nothing doing," Ancky said. The party was held at a posh midtown hotel. So it shouldn't be a total loss, Charles commandeered the Gay Nineties' piano player.

Their week-long honeymoon was in Hot Springs, Arkansas, where, perhaps not coincidentally, Charles was also able to take care of some business with an important department store. "I think that was our trouble," Ancky reflects. "It was always business. Always business. I think he lived his whole life for business."

The Revsons were married in October, and in January, Ancky, who had always gone to Switzerland in the wintertime, said, "C'mon, Charles, it's time to go skiing." Charles said he was sorry, but he couldn't take a vacation just then. "Well, I always go skiing," Ancky said, "that's just a normal thing!" So Charles asked, "Which would you rather: skiing or a mink coat?"

"And that," says Ancky, "is how I got my first mink coat." Charles wouldn't consider letting Ancky go without him, with her friends. "The wife should be barefoot and pregnant, as they say -- that was his philosophy of life," Ancky says. "The wife stays home and he does his business."

Ancky won her second mink coat in a bet. When she would complain about his working too hard, he would say he was going to retire when the business reached $3 million in sales. Ancky bet him a carton of cigarettes against a mink coat that he voodn't. (Then he said he would retire at $10 million; and he once told Martin, when sales were running over $20 million, that a company like theirs shouldn't grow any bigger -- it would lose its prestige image.)

"The first year," Ancky remembers, "we used to go to lots of good places. We saw every show. Charles was a big theatergoer, and we used to sometimes get into a little argument. If the play was no good, he'd say, 'C'mon, let's go.' I'd say, 'Oh, let's stay, it might get better.' Maybe that's why he made three or four nightclubs in one night -- he was impatient. He didn't like something, he'd walk out and go to the next place. He was usually right when he said, 'It won't get any better.'"

The Revsons always ate out -- at Pavilion, the Colony, or at Ronnie's Steak House, a Revson favorite. "He'd say, 'Let's have dinner around seven-thirty.' I'd say, 'Fine,' and show up at the office at seven-thirty. And I vood sit and sit in the waiting room, sometimes until nine o'clock, and it was getting to be a little . . . So I said, 'Charles, I won't come, I won't pick you up, I won't wait, I'll meet you in a restaurant. And if you say we are going to have dinner at eight, we meet at the restaurant at eight.' Then he came on time, I suppose because he didn't want me to sit there by myself. Otherwise you had to wait for him, because business came first."

(Dave Kreloff used to sit with Ancky when she was in the office with nothing to do, even before she married Charles. They would read children's books together to improve her English. "She would read the books and ask me how her pronunciation was," Kreloff says. Mike Sager remembers Ancky coming to the office on Saturdays with Charles and darning his socks.)

Every so often the dashing young couple would go to Ben Marden's casino, a big nightclub over in Jersey well known for its activities upstairs. "Everybody went there," says Ancky, "all of New York." They used to let Ancky win at blackjack just to keep her away from Charles, who was playing on the "real" table for big stakes. By dealing Ancky winning hands, they had her begging Charles to stay just a little longer, and sometimes he would. Later he learned to set in advance exactly how long he would play -- rarely more than half an hour -- and when time was up, he quit. He would win a lot and he would lose a lot, but he would never get carried away. (When he was losing big, Ancky used to give her 13-carat diamond ring a half turn so only the band was showing and say: "You see this big ring?" People would say.' "What big ring?" And Ancky would say.' "Charles just lost it.")

Several times a year they would go out to the track, also, and for a short period in his life Charles became absorbed in the horses. He would sit in the office betting twenty races a day. He enjoyed gambling on tips in the stock market, too. He was not one to buy and hold, he was after action. Yet in business, he was not a gambler. The business was not to be fooled with or jeopardized in any way. Without the business, the rest of this would not have been possible and Charles knew it.

In 1942 Ancky became pregnant with John. "I was excited about it," she says, "because from the day I got married I wanted to get pregnant -- and it wasn't easy." One reason must have been that for a time Charles didn't want to have children. "I wanted to have five," Ancky says, "but he said it wasn't a good idea to bring children into 'this miserable world.' The war was going on and there was a lot of tension." High as Charles was riding by 1942, it still seemed to him a miserable world. He saw life through hypercritical glasses.

Ancky had John, then a miscarriage, then Charles, Jr., then another miscarriage. But later she adopted a daughter (as a final attempt, some said, to regain Charles's attention before their divorce in 1960); and still later, with her new husband, she adopted two more children -- so she wound up with five after all.

During the war, Martin was in the navy and Joe was in the army. Ancky worked for the Red Cross every day from ten to four; she worked for Bundles for Britain and Bundles for America; and she would sometimes get up at five in the morning to go down to the boats that were arriving with wounded soldiers and accompany them in the ambulances to lift their spirits. For recreation, she attended aviation college two nights a week. She learned to fly, but not yet being a citizen could not get her license. (Charles would never fly without two pilots in the cock-pit -- and Ancky was not one of them. "He said he would never go up in a plane with me," she says. He preferred boats to planes, anyway. )

While Ancky was working day and night on her charities, her husband was working day and night on the government contracts Mickey Soroko had somehow managed to land him, and on Revlon. Besides assembling first-aid kits, he was charged with producing dye-markers for the navy and hand-grenades for the army. To do this he set up the Vorset Corporation in Oxford, New Jersey. The plant was carefully divided into eighteen separate buildings so that a mistake in one would not necessarily obliterate all the others.

Vorset was not unprofitable and it kept Charles out of the army. It also performed for the war effort with such distinction as to receive, in July 1944, the army/navy " E" -- an award of excellence" for "achievement in production." This was no routine accolade. As the local New Jersey paper reported at the time: "The little town of Oxford was agog Friday, when more distinguished visitors visited in one day than had ever visited it before in its entire history." Food was by Louis Sherry, music by Charles Knecht and his orchestra, and "The Star-Spangled Banner" by radio star Florence Edison. An "E" pennant was presented and "E" pins were given to every employee of the plant. Charles was justifiably proud. He had set out to make the best damn dye-markers the navy had ever seen, and he had succeeded. Dye-markers are not as easy to make as they sound, given, for one thing, the varying colors and temperatures of water in different parts of the ocean, and given -- as Charles later demonstrated to the navy that he had been -- faulty specifications. He had had to come up with his own recipe for dye-markers.

There is a story that, in the course of the trial and error this effort entailed, the Vorset plant one day turned the Raritan River green. And there is a story that when Charles was in Washington discussing one of his contracts, a procurement officer asked him whether he knew anything about "powder." Meaning gunpowder. Charles, thinking in his own terms, said he knew "everything" about powder, and so was given the go-ahead. There is even a story that one day Charles -- who was not a man to panic -- saw a grenade somehow get its pin plucked. Supposedly, thinking fast, he lunged for it and tossed it out the window.

Revlon, meanwhile, was in a holding pattern. Distribution was extended and sales grew, but supplies were scarce. Glass bottles were rationed. Lipsticks were deemed important for morale, but their metal cases had to be replaced, first with plastic, then with paper. And castor oil, a key component in lipstick, was so hard to come by that when Revson's young chemist, Ray Stetzer, heard of a warehouse-full in Tennessee, he immediately headed south to arrange purchase. He had to devise a quick quality check, and wound up sticking his finger in each of dozens of forty-gallon drums, sniffing and licking. He bought out the whole stock and spent the rest of his trip on the toilet.

Even harder to come by than castor oil were nylons, which led Charles to throw his beret into the leg makeup market that had sprung up. He invested $68,000 in such a product and was about to ship his first few hundred cases when a letter arrived informing him that United Drug (Rexall) had already registered the name he had chosen. He became so disgusted with the whole thing that, rather than change the name or go to court, he sold his entire stock to a cosmetics bootlegger for $8,000 and washed his hands of it. (If he did not become the leg makeup king during World War II, neither, many years later, did his introduction of a male genitalia deodorant spray – Private -- win him a place in the marketing hall of fame.)

The Revsons didn't see each other much during the war years; both were working hard. But they didn't see all that much more of each other after the war, either. Ancky slowed her pace; Charles did not. Ancky would come up to the Squibb Building and say: "Charles, Charles when are you coming home?"

It was his routine throughout life to sleep late and work late. When he was first married he would rise around ten-thirty. But once up, he was too preoccupied to take time for the breakfast Ancky soon stopped bothering to make. He would work until ten-thirty or eleven at night.

They lived in Manhattan, first in the Warwick Hotel, then across the street in a gigantic three-bedroom, three-bath duplex apartment at the Dorset, on Fifty-fourth Street just off Fifth Avenue. The bedrooms were upstairs, overlooking a huge two-story living room.

"Even then he had a fantastic life-style," says Irving Botwin, who first met Charles in 1943, when Ancky was pregnant with John. "He invited us to dinner at Ronnie's Steak House. It was during the war, when steaks were at a premium. There were five of us -- Charles, Ancky, Lester, myself, and one other man. And before you knew it, the table had grown to ten. He had the first round table, the captain's table. He was only thirty-six then, but there was something about him . . . he never came on too strong, he was low-key . . . he just had winner written all over him. I looked at the prices on the menu, $3.50 for a steak, $1 for a shrimp cocktail -- that was a lot of money in those days and I didn't want to impose on the guy, but he insisted I have something first. He was always a good host; and if he wasn't the host, he was a lousy guest, as is usually the case."

After their dinner, his overcoat draped over his shoulders, cape-like, Charles decided to stroll into the Warwick drugstore to see what was cooking. He told Ancky he would meet her back at the apartment shortly. He spent two hours in that drugstore, Irving says, grilling the man behind the counter, studying the terrain, observing the behavior of the customers.

Martin, meanwhile, was living in Westchester with his wife, Julie, whom he had married in 1938, and with their young son, Peter. Julie Phelps Hall had been a nightclub singer before she married Martin. One of the men she had dated before Martin was (just to keep things interesting) . . . Charles. For years the two families were very close; it was Julie, by one account at least, who helped persuade the Charles Revsons to move up to Westchester. Shortly after Johnnie was born in 1943, Charles plunked down $90,000 for a ten-acre home in Rye, formerly the home of Cluett Peabody. Charles described "Holly House," as it was called, as "early Tudor." It came with a tennis court and they soon added a pool. Not for Charles, who was too embarrassed by his skinny legs ever to wear a swimsuit or short pants, but for Ancky, who loved to swim. (Her home in Palm Beach has a pool and a private tunnel to the ocean.) To help her keep Holly House in order, she had a cook, a butler, and an upstairs maid. To help with the children there was Katie Lowery, a governess who came to help out for six weeks in the summer of 1945 and wound up staying thirty years. (After the divorce she remained with Ancky to look after her adopted children.)

The Revsons were now Westchesterites, but they did not give up the apartment at the Dorset until the late fifties, when they moved into the Pierre. In addition, for a dozen years or more Charles shared an apartment at 240 Central Park South with his bachelor friend Lester Herzog ("the king's pimp," as some knew him). Charles would stay in town Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday nights; by the fifties, he would often stay in town Wednesday nights, too. Ancky would come in Monday nights for the opera. Both boys attended Rye Country Day School from the age of four through the ninth grade, when they were sent to Deerfield.

On weekends, Holly House was like a country club: There were always twenty cars in the driveway (several of them their own) . . . people would be playing tennis or taking lessons from a local pro, Joe Sobek . . . swimming . . . "always big parties, sandwiches for everybody," Ancky recalls. "It was lots of fun in those days. You know, I miss it." In the wintertime there were sleigh rides followed by hot chocolate.

Saturday nights they played gin. Charles didn't like bridge. "We'd have maybe four tables, sixteen people would come over," says Ancky, "and then at eleven o'clock or midnight we'd have a big buffet with all kinds of food and everybody would stop playing. And after that everybody would go back to playing cards. Charles was always a gambler. He was very good at gin." Except that there was one guy who took him for $200 almost every week. "Charles was like his private patsy," Harry Meresman says. "His mind wanders, like mine. Finally he owned up to it and quit, cold turkey."

Charles was a gambler; Ancky was a collector. She collected porcelain shoes and report cards and Red Cross citations and the notes that came with gifts and . . . She even collected dogs, or so it must have seemed to Charles. There was an Irish setter named King, a gift of the Meresmans; a cocker spaniel named Dynamite; and quite a procession of others. Charles did not get along with dogs. Big ones, Ancky suggests, may have frightened him a little. When Ancky went to buy a poodle, but was told by the owner that she could only have it if she also bought "the boxer that came with it," and so bought the boxer, too -- Charles put his foot down. "Either it goes or I go," he said of the boxer, and it went. Charles's younger son (and the poodle) were disconsolate, but his older son, John, was not. John blew hot and cold with dogs. On one occasion he tired of King and Dynamite and buried them in an underground garbage can. (They survived.)

Sunday for Charles would begin with a late-morning perusal of the papers, noting the news and poring over his own and competitors' ads. Then there might be more tennis, or possibly a trip to the factory or the lab. Ancky had to try on all the lipsticks, and then wear them into the hotbox to see how they stood up in heat and humidity. It was hell, she says.

For a time Charles had a box at Yankee Stadium, and would take his boys out to the ball park. "He liked to go shopping at the A and P, also" says Ancky -- "Can you imagine that? Charles Revson shopping at the A and P? Going to the ball game? So he wasn't always the way he became later on." He would play Monopoly with the children. He once built a rowboat with them, from a kit, with the help of the tennis pro. On rare occasions, he would drive the family up to Moosehead Lake, in Maine, to go fishing. "I must say," Ancky says, "when he was home he spent a lot of time with the children. The trouble was, he wasn't home that often."

Christmas was a warm family occasion. The Revsons always had two trees. Max, the gardener, would string the lights, but Charles insisted on decorating the main tree with Ancky on Christmas Eve after the boys had gone to sleep. Even on Christmas day he would not rise until around eleven, while the boys, naturally, if they could sleep at all in the face of such impending munificence, were up at seven. Thus, the second, smaller tree upstairs. It was stocked with just enough minor attractions to keep the boys occupied until Charles was ready for Christmas to begin.

Santa was good to the Revsons. They were never a deprived family. The boys had to wash cars for their allowance, it's true -- but look what they were washing. The family fleet consisted, around 1957, of a chauffeured limousine; a tangerine-colored Eldorado Charles had had specially made for Ancky to match one of his new lipstick shades (years earlier there had been an ultraviolet Chrysler); a Corvette and a Thunderbird both purchased in one day; a station wagon; an old three-wheeled Cushman scooter they called "the putt-putt," which Charles enioyed driving into town for a laugh; and a lawn-mower-motor "car" for the kids to drive around the property.

(With that many cars there had to be accidents. Looking out his office window one afternoon, Charles noticed a bashed-up tangerine-colored Cadillac being towed down Fifth Avenue. He knew Ancky had had an accident even before she called him from the hospital, unhurt, to break the news. He himself was once helping the Meresmans dig one of their cars out of the snow. It was their car and their driveway, but he had taken charge of the operation. Finally the tires caught hold as he gunned the engine into a frenzy -- and the car into the garage wall. "Well, you win some and you lose some," the Meresmans recall his saying. In much the same spirit, John once managed to back the Eldorado into the Thunderbird.)

Charles was thirty-nine when his second son arrived, in March 1946. He wanted to name him Joseph, as he did not expect his brother to marry and have a son of his own. (Joe did marry, the following year -- Charles was best man at the wedding -- and had two sons and a daughter.) But Ancky hated the name Joseph . . . had never liked her own name, Joharma ... and so, for the first week of his life, the second son was known as "Mr. X." Finally, they agreed to name him Charles Haskell Revson, Jr. His mother has always called him Boochic; others know him as Boochic, Junior, or Charles. For the longest time he felt uncomfortable being introduced to people as "Charles Revson," with all that that implied.

"I never really knew my father," Charles, Jr., says. "I would see him one out of every five or six nights maybe. He'd come home Friday night, we'd be watching television or something and would come down to say hello to him, kiss him on the cheek, and then go back upstairs. I'd see him maybe Saturday. He did always insist on our kissing him, but he wasn't the type you'd just put your arms around and hug. If anything was wrong, I could always count on his help; but when I was growing up, I didn't see him that much."

Nor was Ancky what Charles, Jr., would call a "mother's mother." "When she was younger," he says, "she was a glamorous, beautiful-looking woman. She didn't want to sit around. She always wanted to go out and be seen . . . I'm very close to my nurse, Katie -- she brought me up." Charles left it to Katie to provide the discipline. He never spanked the children or commanded them to do anything. "What he would do," Charles, Jr., says, "is nag and nag and keep at you. And when he stopped nagging, then you knew you were in trouble. Because then he'd cut you off completely.

"He paraded himself around with the feeling that he was something very, very special. He was like a headmaster, like a teacher who's always right. You never got to know him. He never let you get close.

"He used to drive me nuts. He didn't want me to wear a pompadour in the third grade like everyone else. 'That's for sissies . . . you can't wear that . . . you've got to be a man.' One time we went to Saks when I was seven or eight. My father drove the tailor absolutely nuts. I was so embarrassed! He could embarrass you quite often."

If in other respects Charles Revson was not the perfect family man, there was one circumstance under which he would call an immediate truce with his brothers; one visitor to the office who would never be kept waiting and before whom his speech would be reduced to the purest civility. That man was, of course, the Maior.

"He was really a very fine man," says Ancky, "but I must say he was quite difficult, very spoiled. Very spoiled. He used to get so mad if he couldn't have the car and chauffeur! If Daddy had tickets to the theater and the secretary had forgotten to pick them up . . . boy, he was pretty upset. Believe you me, he liked to live very well.

"I always had a box at the opera, at the Met, and he used to go with me and I'd say, 'Please, Daddy, be quiet,' because he used to sing along with the opera. He knew every opera. Any music you vood hear, he could tell you, 'That's from such-and-such opera.' He knew the composer and everything."

(Charles would drop in on the opera only occasionally. It was a box for eight, so there was always room. He might arrive at ten, sit through the end of Rigoletto, and then take Ancky and her friends out to eat.)

"A funny story . . . I'm going to tell it -- I know Charles gets annoyed, but it's an idiosyncrasy people have. The Major wouldn't use the phone in his room. You know, the hotel used to charge you . . . it was a nickel in those days . . . so the hotel would charge ten cents or fifteen for each call. He'd rather go downstairs and call you from a pay phone. It was really silly. An idiosyncrasy, you know."

In 1949, the Major died. One might have expected the cause to be cancer: The Major not only rolled and packed cigars, he inhaled them. But it was a heart attack. Lillian Dunn remembers going to the funeral. "That's the last of the Maior," Charles told her sadly.

There were two impediments to a perfect marriage between Charles and Johanna Revson. First, Charles was never home. Second, they were both strong, stubborn people. Charles could -- and did -- spend two hours arguing with Ancky on a transatlantic phone call. Usually their disagreements related to the children.

For one thing, Ancky wasn't Jewish. Charles himself was not particularly religious (even though "Revson" means "rabbi's son"); but he was not about to have his sons singing "Jesus Loves Me," either. Imagine his surprise, as they say, therefore, when he came downstairs unusually early one Sunday morning, around eleven, to see his two boys all dressed up. Where were they going? More to the point, it turned out, where had they been? Indeed, where had they been going every Sunday morning for two years while their father was asleep upstairs? Sunday School. (This despite the fact that Ancky was not particularly religious, either.) They never went again.

Charles didn't want his sons going to a Protestant Sunday School, but he did want them to go to camp. Ancky did not, and they wound up not going. He also wanted them to go to prep school, which they did. Charles wanted Boochic to take Saturday morning boxing lessons. Ancky was unalterably opposed to the idea. (Charles, Jr., didn't like it either.)

But the biggest problem was competition from the business. "Charles, why do you work so hard," Ancky would ask as he got richer and richer. "It's easy to get to the top," Charles would reply. "The hard thing is to stay there." Ancky was itching to go to the parties and balls that, years later, Charles would begin to go to with his third wife, Lyn. "If he might have been more social," she says, "I might still be married to him. It's just that I got tired of sitting at home and not doing anything. I feel if you sit home too much your life is passing you by completely."

He was, besides being tired when he got home from work, shy. He felt most uncomfortable making small talk with polished New York socialites. He was more at home with Lester and a couple of broads. And that brings up the painful issue of Charles's fidelity. Charles never had any serious affairs while he was married to Ancky -- and that, one of his long-time associates and screwing buddies told me, is the important thing. But there is little doubt that on a night-to-night basis he was a firm believer in the double standard. He called Ancky frequently to find out just what she was doing at all times, but did not hold himself equally accountable.

Once, about halfway through their marriage, Ancky arrived elegantly attired in his outer office. Charles had altogether forgotten that he was to take her to the opera. He turned to one of his men and started to attack him in front of Ancky. "Now you've got to call a meeting? You couldn't take care of this this morning? This afternoon? I promised my wife I would take her to the opera!" The executive, who hadn't called a meeting at all, but who thought it best to play along, apologized, explaining that it was a terrible emergency. Charles dispatched Lester to put Ancky in a cab and told her he would be along as soon as he could break loose. When Lester came back upstairs, he asked, "Did she go?" And when Lester said she had, he said, "Okay, what have you got for me tonight?"

Sales manager Jack Price, now retired in Scottsdale, Arizona, with his wife of forty-seven years, claims to have been one of Charles's chief procurers until he left Revlon in 1944. "Charlie Revson never lived a healthy day of his life without screwing at least three times," he says. "He did it anytime he wanted, and he always paid for it. He never romanced any of the girls -- he didn't have the time or the interest." He did it in the office, he did it on the road, and most of all he did it up in the apartment at 240 Central Park South that was registered in Lester Herzog's name.

The apartment, to which only Price, Herzog, and Revson had keys, consisted of a large living room, a large kitchen, and a long bedroom with three beds. It was used to entertain visiting buyers as well as Revson and his inner circle. There was the evening, for example, that Charlie, Lester, A1 Katz, a Revlon salesman, and a jobber from out of town were all sitting on the floor playing strip poker. Four women whom Price had arranged for were already stripped and looking on. Price himself, of course, was only an observer: "He never saw me naked unless I had just come out of the shower." Charlie, on the other hand, was exceptionally well endowed, Price says (holding his hands apart as though boasting about a fish he had caught) and he was not averse to letting people in on the secret.

The poker game progressed and the Revlon salesman, a New England family man, was losing badly. Finally, Price says, he loses everything, "and he has to lay one of the broads in front of everybody." He doesn't want to. He says, "Charlie, look, I've been married fourteen years . . . Please . . .' Revson says: "You got into it, you started with it, you gotta go through with it." Then he turns to Price and says: "If he doesn't, I want him canned tomorrow morning." He turns back to the salesman and says, "What the hell do you care? These girls aren't going to say anything. They don't care. Take off your clothes and fuck. If I were you, Maurie," he advises icily, "I'd do it. You got yourself into this."

So he did.

"The greatest orgy I ever saw in my life happened in the Drake Hotel in Chicago," Price says. "It was an enormous suite on the third floor, around 1943. We were all sitting around and the madam comes to me and says, 'Jack, there's a girl here I haven't sent out too much. She hasn't had much contact with men. She's not a virgin, but she told me she's never had an orgasm.' She was a slender young girl, around twenty-one, and kind of pretty -- but scared. I told Charlie and he went over and talked to her. He told me later that he offered her a hundred dollars if she did have an orgasm. The girl goes into another room with the madam and finally she comes out with a kimono on. She lays down on the floor right in front of everyone. This is part of Charlie's deal, it's got to be in front of everybody else. He always did it in front of people. And sometimes right in the middle he'd look around to see everyone else's reaction.

"So Charlie starts on her. They're both naked. One of the Revlon jobbers, a short, cocky guy, is running around with nothing but his socks on, with a hernia as big as a baseball. [Price has an eye for the tasteful detail.] Charlie keeps pumping and pumping and nothing is happening. He could go longer without an orgasm than anyone else I knew. A doctor once told me that the larger you are, the longer it takes. He kept after that girl for an hour at least, in front of everybody. Suddenly she got it -- this is no fake and he and everyone else knew it. She threw her arms around him . . . and then it was over. They were both soaking wet. She immediately ran to the bathroom, and by the time she came back Charlie had his shorts on and was no longer interested."

This was in 1943, and Charles did not grow more faithful to Ancky with time. Yet he didn't want Ancky to leave him, as she began threatening she would. In fact, when in 1960 she actually decided to get a divorce, he offered her her full $2.5 million settlement plus a magnificent ruby necklace if she would stay.

Revson attributed his marital problems to his marrying women less intelligent than he, and with whom he thus had difficulty communicating. But given his character, it would be a rare woman indeed who could have satisfied him and maintained her dignity at the same time.

"He liked to tell you everything you should do," Ancky says. "He didn't want to have any aggravation; he wanted you to agree with him on everything."

He would tell Ancky how to make up. "I have big eyes and I wanted to make them look larger and he always said, 'You shouldn't do that.'" He would tell her not to go water-skiing. "But Charles, I love to go water-skiing! Why shouldn't I go water-skiing?" He would tell her where she could and could not go. "I was on a trip once with friends. I went to Holland and Paris, but I could not go any farther south than Paris. He made great stipulations. It was silly -- if you want to do something bad in Europe it's very easy; you don't have to go to the Riviera. But he had very little belief in people. It was his character. He didn't trust people, I think."

Charles became more demanding and difficult as he got older. It got to be his way or no way. "He was a man," Ancky says, "who always wanted to be right. That was his character. And nine out of ten times he was right!" (The tenth time he could usually wangle out of admitting he was wrong. "He was very good at shifting the blame for things," Charles, Jr., says. )

Though she divorced him, Ancky loved Charles to the end. "How can I explain?" she reflects. "Charles expected you to be completely in the background. I think now that you know me a little, you know I am not a background girl. You must be a person. That's the way I feel, anyhow. You cannot be somebody's slave . . . that's very difficult. For me it's difficult. And yet I don't know how to describe him, because he could be the most thoughtful man. I remember once he was in Europe and he brought me back beautiful Dutch Delft. Or he'd bring me caviar from Paris. I never felt left behind with Charles -- I really mean that." Yet Charles would never allow Ancky to accompany him on business trips. It was a strict company policy that wives be left at home, regardless of who might be willing to pay their travel expenses.