In the factory, we make cosmetics; in the store, we sell hope.

-- Charles Revson

Marketing is strategy. Instinctively or consciously, Charles plotted a shrewd one. From the beginning, Revlon's approach was that nail enamel was a fashion accessory, not a mere beauty aid, and that women should use different shades to suit different outfits, moods, and occasions. This automatically broadened the market. Where before a woman might not have bought a new bottle of nail enamel until the old one was empty, now she might keep half a dozen or more on her dresser . . . particularly because fashions, and with them Revlon's colors, kept changing so fast. Like General Motors, a company Revson greatly admired, Revlon instituted the model change and, with it, planned obsolescence. Revlon would bring out a new color every fall and spring. By the midforties, its semiannual shade promotions were as much an event to women as Detroit's new-car introductions were to men. The most popular colors would remain in Revlon's Iine for years; but when the new color was announced, smart women just had to add it to their collection.

Later, with General Motors as his model, Charles developed separate cosmetic lines, similar to GM's divisions, to go after each segment of the market. Revlon itself was the popular-priced line (which Charles preferred to liken to Pontiac rather than Chevrolet); Natural Wonder, the youth line; Moon Drops, the dry-skin line; Etherea, the hypoallergenic line; Marcella Bor-ghese, the high-class line with an international flavor; and Ultima II, the top of the line. Likewise the fragrance lines. And the strategy worked as well for Revlon as it had for GM.

Although Revlon was born of the Depression, Charles chose to compete not on price (there were nail polishes around for a dime), but on quality. Furthermore, he understood what he was really selling. He wasn't selling the fact that his polish was made with pigment, and thus fully covered the nails; he was selling the chance that it might turn the right head, or lend "a touch of class." He wasn't selling a very deep red polish; he was selling Cherries in the Snow and Fire and Ice and Fifth Avenue Red-and with the colors, excitement, fun, and a fantasy. Since it didn't cost any more to make dark red polish called Berry Bon Bon than to make plain dark red polish, and the one could be sold for six times the price of the other, this was not a bad strategy.

In order to sell the excitement, fun, and fantasy -- indeed, in order to create it -- Revlon always advertised very heavily in relation to its sales. One result was that beauty salons and competitors got the impression Revlon was a much larger concern than it really was -- which was part of the idea. (The company borrowed privately for years before going for its first bank loan, in order not to reveal its modest balance sheet. Only the Revsons, Charlie Lachman, and Harry Meresman knew the figures; and it was Harry who arranged for the early financing, at 2 percent a month, through an arm of his accounting firm. Later, when Revlon did go to Manufacturers Trust, the bank had to agree to accept only a balance sheet -- no income statement -- and to keep just one copy of it, sealed in an envelope in the loan officer's desk drawer.)

Revlon's first ad outside the trade journals appeared in the summer of 1935 in The New Yorker. This may have had something to do with Charles's passing their offices each day on the way to and from his own, but more likely it was that The New Yorker woman was exactly the kind of "classy dame" with which he wanted Revlon associated. The ninth-of-a-page ad read:

[INSERT PHOTO HERE] "Summer Shades in Nail Polish"

The New Yorker . . . The House of Revlon . . . a New York socialite . . . Saks Fifth Avenue. It's the image that counts, never mind the fact that "the House of Revlon" was a few bare rooms where people poured from big bottles into little ones and trimmed applicator brushes; or that Charles didn't even know a New York socialite; or that that ad, which cost $335.56, was Revlon's total consumer advertising budget for the year. (In 1975, Revlon was spending $75,000 in The New Yorker, and perhaps $65 million elsewhere.) As for Revlon's being available at Saks, an early departure from Revlon's beauty salon exclusivity, the only thing more important to Charles than being in Saks was life itself -and it was a toss-up, at that. Saks was everything this boy from the west side of Manchester wanted to be.

Whatever profit Revlon made was plowed back into advertising. At first the company even borrowed to advertise. The suit was enormous demand at the beauty salons for the latest Revlon color. And the mechanics of a manicurist's tray being what they were (particularly the trays Revlon designed), it was much easier to carry just one line of nail enamel than several. It was also less of an investment. Revlon became not just the General Motors of nail enamels in the beauty salon field; it became the AT&T.

In its first five years, Revlon dealt exclusively with the beauty trade. That in itself was a selling point to the beauticians; and since the company couldn't sell everyone at once anyway, it was good strategy to start here. What better advertisement than to have Revlon used by the professionals? What more ideal arrangement than to have women pay to have ten samples of the product painted onto their nails, to be shown around town for the rest of the week? At ten to the customer, Revlon calculated in 1948, within a week or two of introducing a new shade upwards of 50,000,000 freshly manicured samples would be strumming the national tablecloth.

It was only natural that women whose nails were done with Revlon enamel upstairs in a department store beauty salon would then demand the product downstairs at the cosmetics counter. Revlon soon obliged. And after selected department stores were opened, selected drugstores were offered the opportunity of carrying the Revlon line, as well. "Selected," because a Revlon product was not just any commodity, like soap powder, to be found on every corner. The trick was to make it nearly as available and yet maintain the aura of exclusivity. By limiting the Revlon "franchise" to the best outlets, Revlon also gained more leverage with each one, and the ability to demand the kind of attention and promotion it could not otherwise expect.

Revson understood the difference between a differentiable product and a commodity. It is the difference between Morton's salt, at ten cents a pound, and Lawry's seasoned salt, at $1.79. Both have brand names, true, but there is not much you can do to distinguish one pure salt from another. You compete on price and on the efficiencies of your operation. Revson didn't want to compete on price, and his operation was not all that efficient. He wanted to compete on the creativity of his products and on his company's marketing skill. Example: buoyed by the incredible advertising power of The $64,000 Question, Revlon hair spray sales reached a volume of $15 million or more, and was a substantial part of the business. But hair spray, like soap or deodorant, was more of a commodity than a fashion accessory, and Charles saw that the margins were going out of the business. So, rather than lower his price to meet the growing competition, or advertise aggressively to maintain the market share built up by The $64,000 Question, Charles made the strategic decision to "milk" the product. He kept his price high and cut back his advertising. His profit on each can sold, with fewer ads to pay for, was juicy, even though, predictably, the sales volume began a steady decline. It was a profitable way to bow out of a market Revson felt wasn't worth fighting for.

"Cost-of-goods" -- the cost of the product itself and its packaging -- was the fundamental number in Revson's business equation. Charles liked products that cost little to make, relative to what he could sell them for. If his cost-of-goods was low enough, he could advertise heavily; he could afford severe quality standards; he could make mistakes; he could operate his impressive research facility; and he could still make a good profit.

Many manufacturers will sell a product for twice what it costs them to make, applying the rest of the money to indirect costs like advertising, sales commissions, management, overhead, interest and, they hope, profits. Revson tried to sell his products for quadruple, not just double, their cost. The distributors and stores to whom the products were sold would then approximately double the price once more.

Cost figures are carefully guarded. However, those that follow, from 1962, are fairly representative of Revlon's costs throughout its history. Cosmetics have gone up in price since 1962, of course, as have Revlon's costs-but the ratios have not changed that much. Costs at Revlon rose relative to selling prices during the sixties but then began falling significantly as, in the last few years, a professional management group began to manage the operations of the company as shrewdly as Charles was managing its marketing.

REVLON COST-OF-MATERIALS, JUNE 1962

(Selected Products)

[INSERT TABLE HERE]

The cost-of-materials table shown above is a glimpse of the heart of Revlon's business. (Cost-of-materials includes the bottle, can, or ease; the goo inside; the label; the box-everything but factory labor and overhead. And there's a good deal less labor involved in putting together a lipstick than, say, a watch. Revson's rule of thumb was to keep his cost-of-materials under 20 percent of his wholesale price, and to keep his cost-o£-goods-materials plus labor and overhead -- under 33 percent.) Notice, for example, that the materials in a seventy-five-cent bottle of cream nail enamel cost Revlon only one tenth of that. (The enamel itself, minus bottle and box, cost practically nothing.) A two-ounce bottle of Eterna 27, the magic wrinkle remover, sold for $8.00 and cost just fifty cents (plus labor and overhead) to produce. Other products allowed less generous markups (like the hair sprays), while some allowed more. Nail polish remover didn't allow as good a markup, presumably because it's not what you'd call a high-fashion item. This commodity, however, had the very considerable advantage of being carried along by the rest of the Revlon line. Futurama lipstick cases, including one in sterling silver for $47.50, had modest markups relative to those of the lipstick refills -- the old "give away the razors to sell the blades" ploy, only not quite so generous.

Note also the dynamics of "economy sizes." In 1962 you could buy three times as much Revlon Velvety Nail Enamel Remover for sixty cents as you could for thirty-five cents. But you weren't hurting Revlon; the extra two ounces, including the larger package, cost a mere 3.3 cents. The markup on the extra two ounces was even greater than on the first ounce.

And note, finally, the impact volume can have on costs. The little one and a quarter-ounce purse-size Living Curl hair sprays actually cost Revlon more than each regular seven-ounce can -- presumably because there were twenty times as many regular-size cans being made.

One reason for Revlon's hefty markups is that the consumer is paying for a lot of advertising. Professor Theodore Levitt of Harvard Business School, among others, argues that advertising and packaging are as much a part of cosmetic products as alcohol or lanolin, and so a justifiable, albeit very large, part of the cost. Would an unadvertised private-label lipstick in a plain package afford a woman as much satisfaction as a Revlon lipstick at twice the price? Would she be participating in the fun and fantasy? If the answer is yes, then Safeway is missing a bet. But women, by and large, don't want elegance on sale. It is a marketing cliché that with certain ailing products the way to boost sales is not to cut prices but to hike them.

Revlon's fashion strategy came into its own in 1940, with the "Matching Lips and Fingertips" campaign and the introduction of Revlon lipstick. For the first time, Revlon ads, like its products, were in full color, and spread over two pages in such magazines as Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. "Pick up a tea-cup, light a cigarette, draw on a glove. Your slightest gesture delights the eye . . . with lips and fingertips accented vitally, fashionably by Revlon NaiI Enamel." Crudely put, Revlon was selling "class to the masses"; a chance to be fashionable for the price of a lipstick.

Matching lips and fingertips was a canny way to enter the lipstick business. The only way to match your lips with Revlon fingertips was, of course, with Revlon lipstick. Neat. Interestingly, "matching lips and fingertips" was not an original Revlon idea. Another firm had used the theme in its ads a few years earlier. The difference was, as with so many other things he copied -- Revson made it work.

It wasn't until 1944 (Pink Lightning) that the full-scale color promotions were begun. Prior to that there had been advertising campaigns like "Expect Great Things From Revlon," and "Morale Is A Woman's Business." Kickier, and more Revlon-like, was the first ad to run in Vogue, in June 1936, reproduced on the following page. It had what came to be known as "the Revlon touch," that little extra creative twist that people found hard to define, but to which they all referred.

[INSERT PICTURE HERE] "Scandal in the Revlon Nail Polish Family!"

The shade promotions allowed for total "theming" of the marketing effort. To introduce Fatal Apple in 1945 -- "the most tempting color since Eve winked at Adam" -- color spreads were placed in the fashion magazines; department stores were furnished with window displays; the Revlon showroom was decorated to match; and Revlon's publicity director, Bea Castle, arranged an elaborate press party that featured not only Maurice the Mindreader, but also a snake and snake charmer from the William Morris Agency, a hollow gold apple door prize from Cartier, a grove of miniature apple trees from the Washington

State apple-growers' association, and fashions from Forever Eve. All New York's top editors and publishers were invited to this party and some of them came. Charles himself remained in the background, but loved it. He had taken particular interest in the menu: lobster and rice, meatballs and spaghetti -- this was a cocktail party, but he felt that people coming from work wanted more than just cheese on a cracker. They wanted entertainment and something good to eat along with their drinks.

When Plumb Beautiful was introduced in 1949, Bergdorf Goodman devoted eight windows to the promotion, where Russian sables, chinchilla, ermine, and mink were the background for Revlon's sixty-cent nail enamel. Such was (and is) the power of a Revlon promotion in the fashion world.

In 1950, Revlon kicked off its new color with a full-page teaser in The New York Times. Smoke was curling from the burning edges of a hole in the center of the page. At first glance, the hole and the smoke looked real. The headline was, Where's the Fire? And that's all. No Revlon signature, no copy, nothing. Shortly thereafter, Where's the Fire? was introduced as Revlon's new shade.

(Revlon had no monopoly on cleverness. To launch Heaven Sent in the late forties, Madame Helena Rubinstein floated hundreds of pale blue balloons down on Fifth Avenue, each bearing a sample of the fragrance.)

The shade promotion to end all others was Revlon's Fire and Ice, in the fall of 1952. "You could hardly pick up a general-circulation or fashion magazine this week," Business Week led off a major story, "without seeing the [Fire and Ice] advertisement . . . To much of the industry, this was one of the most effective ads in cosmetics history. In a sense, it marked a new height in an industry where advertising is all-important (cosmetics are second only to food in advertising volume). Perhaps more than any previous ad, this one successfully combines dignity, class, and glamour (a trade euphemism for sex)."

The two-page spread consisted of a dazzling model, Dorian Leigh, in an icy silver-sequin dress with a fiery scarlet cape; and on the facing page, the headline, ARE YOU MADE FOR FIRE AND ICE? You were, the ad stated, if you could answer eight of the following fifteen questions in the affirmative:

When a recipe calls for one dash of bitters, do you think it's better with two?

Do you love to look up at a man?

Do you think any man really understands you?

Do you close your eyes when you're kissed?

The idea behind this campaign, besides playing on the "duality of women," was to create a sense of indignation at all the attention European women had lately been getting at the expense of the supposedly more tame American women. Press releases stressed this theme, and Carl Erbe invented the American Institute for the Recognition of "Fire and Ice" to fan the flames.

The response to the promotion was sensational. (It didn't hurt the other forty-eight shades of lipstick and nail enamel in the Revlon line, either.) Nine thousand window displays were devoted to Fire and Ice. Every newspaper and magazine wrote about it and every radio announcer made reference to it. Fire and Ice beauty contests were conducted around the country. Disc jockeys and newspaper editors were sent questionnaires ("In your field, you are a pulse-taker and an opinion-maker. Your ideas are very important . . ."); and the uncynical responses that were returned, by the hundreds, were consistent with the times, Pat Chamburs of radio station WFLA in Tampa answered this way:

1. Ever so slightly pouted lips.

2. Smoldering, sad eyes with a "I wanta, but only with you" look.

3. Lovely, large, and prominently displayed bust.

Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, YES!!!

(Could we take my wife along?)

Marilyn Monroe, Antonel la Lualdi, Rossana Podesta, Silvano Mangano, Linda Darnell, Marilyn Monroe. [You can see that the European "threat" had some basis.]

The managing editor of the Waukegan, Illinois, News-Sun answered: "I don't know any, and I don't know what a Fire and Ice girl is . . . but I'm for 'em."

The editor of the Wesleyan College paper wrote at the bottom of his questionnaire, "Please send me more information."

Twenty-two hotels, from the Plaza in New York to the Cornhusker in Lincoln, Nebraska, were induced to stage Fire and Ice preview parties. Rudy Vallee, starring at the Sheraton Biltmore in Providence, talked about the Fire and Ice party all week.

Judges in the Hollywood Fire and Ice beauty contest included David Niven, Robert Stack, and Ray Milland.

Arthur Godfrey, Jimmy Durante, and Steve Allen managed to play on the promotion. Dave Garroway gave the Fire and Ice quiz to one of his secretaries on the Today show; Beat the Clock and Search for Tomorrow also found ways to work it in. Bob Ferris, of radio station KNX in Los Angeles, went through a "Firewater and Dice" routine. ("Do sables excite you? No, I never cared for the smell of horses.")

Revlon's advertising muscle never hurt in getting plugs like these. "Those things are done sort of inadvertently," Martin once explained to Business Week. "What you do is go to see Hope or Skelton or somebody of that nature and tell them about your new product coming out with, oh, a couple of million dollars in advertising, and then the script writer writes it in . . . So that's the way we get it in -- sort of inadvertently." Commented S. J. Perelman: "The easy negligence of the whole thing is truly captivating. For sheer insouciance, nothing could surpass the spectacle of an incipient Mark Twain grinding out cosmetic yaks with a two-million-dollar pitchfork lightly pinking his bottom."

The Fire and Ice campaign definitely had "the Revlon touch." "There's a little bit of bad in every good woman," Revlon marketers felt, and it was to this that Revlon always tried to appeal. It was a matter of giving women what Kay Daly called "a little immoral support." Revson wanted his models to be "Park Avenue whores" -- elegant, but with the sexual thing underneath. The Fire and Ice copy asked: "What is the American girl made of? Sugar and spice and everything nice? Not since the days of the Gibson Girl! There's a new American beauty . . . she's tease and temptress, siren and gamin, dynamic and demure. Men find her slightly, delightfully baffling. Sometimes a little maddening. Yet they admit she's easily the most exciting woman in the world! She's the 1952 American beauty, with a foolproof formula for melting a male! She's the 'Fire and Ice' girl. (Are you?)"

"Our ads were more strongly read than the editorial copy in the magazines where we advertised, and that was given to us as a goal," says Norman B. Norman, who headed Revlon's advertising from the agency side in the late forties and into the midfifties. "All Revlon advertising had to do with emotions . . . how women thought, how they lived, how they loved . . . and we wove in our products. That's quite different from what most companies do, where they describe their products, the benefits of them. Revlon never did that, which was a brilliance of its own." (In later years Revlon did do that, particularly when it had unique treatment products to sell which could be differentiated from the competition on their merits.)

Fire and Ice was just the kind of manufactured national event that The Great Gatsby, from Paramount Pictures, would be twenty-odd years later. Paramount had a somewhat more jaded press and populace to try to excite; but they also had a classic novel, a nostalgia craze, and Robert Redford to work with. Revlon had a red lipstick.

Who didn't?

Now, the question naturally arises, who was the genius behind this campaign and the others? And the first part of the answer is that it was not Charles. Yes, Charles had the judgment most of the time to know what was good and what was not, in itself no small talent. But he was no David Ogilvy. As a copywriter, Charles could not have commanded $100 a week. It was not he who came up with names like Paint the Town Pink or Rosy Future or Pink Vanilla. His creativity lay in the product end. As a marketer, he was shrewd rather than creative. He liked to think of himself as a great editor. "The trick isn't to know when you have it," he used to say, "the trick is to know when you don't." His forte was criticism, not enthusiasm.

No one could match his scrutiny of the color in an ad, or his sense of how the model's eyebrows should look, or his patience in endlessly improving a package design. But he needed a good deal of coaching when it came to words. "Look," he told his marketing people once, "all of us can't write. All of us are not endowed with the ability to write. All of us don't know how to put the words together. But at the least -- the very, very least -- all of us who are connected with marketing, regardless of what, should try to learn what they are and become editors, at least, of words."

Those who worked with him closely say that his editing had two consistent and allied characteristics. The first was to make things "safer." Where he made change after change, the trend was often away from the daring or the risky or the bold to the more conventional. Secondly, his renowned "perfectionism" to some degree was, rather, the grip of indecision. He would redo and redo and change and change past one deadline after another, not so much to make each version better than the last -- which they often were not -- but because of the fear of letting loose something that might be no good. He was a terrible procrastinator because, egotist though he was, like anyone else he was unsure of his judgments and afraid of making a mistake.

Revlon's creativity was the product of a few key people within the company and an endless succession of agency people. Bea Castle was one of the company's creative mainstays, responsible for many of the early shade names.

"Fire and Ice was my name," she remembers. "The color we had for that particular fall was not a very exciting color . . . it was red. How much can you say about red? But it was the color that women were going to use, and it was the season when the Italian starlets first came into being. We were struggling with names, trying to do a red that had meaning. So Kay Daly and I, who worked together as a team for a long time, were knocking around themes and names, names and themes, over breakfast one morning at Reuben's. As we were talking, I said: 'Let's talk about what a woman is. That's what we're really talking about. A woman is hot and cold, good or bad, a lady and a tramp . . . a woman is fire and ice.' At which point Kay said, 'Just a minute, I've got an idea.' We both agreed it was a corny name, but that we could do something with it by doing a questionnaire. Kay did half of the questions and I did half. Then we decided to use Suzy Parker as the model. [Actually, it was Suzy's sister, Dorian Leigh.] I took her over to the Waldorf and said, 'Put a streak of silver in her hair. That's the ice.' Kay went to a designer and had him do up an all-glitter dress with a red coat.'"

And so the creative process unfolds. In more ways than one. Kay Daly's version of the genesis of Fire and Ice differs only on the essentials: "I once used 'fire and ice' in a piece of copy that went, 'all sugar and spice in the sunlight, all fire and ice at night,'" Kay explains, "so I pulled that phrase Fire and Ice as a shade name, and it was approved. Bea had nothing to do with this. Charles then said, 'l would like to see an ad that would be an answer to all the publicity going on that Italian women are the most exciting women in the world.' I had to give it to him by Monday, so I spent the whole weekend working on it. I wrote a kind of Time/Life essay on American women… and it seemed dull. Finally I decided at the last minute Sunday night to do it as a questionnaire.

"Since advertising was supposed to be Martin's function, Charles didn't get into it as much then as he did later. He would just come in at the end and kill it all, usually, or change it all. But when he read this copy . . . I remember there were a lot of people sitting around the boardroom table in the old Squibb Building, and Charles sauntered in as he does [at a bit of a tilt, elbows close to his sides], and he sat down at the end of the table reading this thing. He was very intent on it, and then he looked up with a grin on his face -- which was very unusual -- and he looked right around the table to me and said, 'Who wrote this crap?' And that's the only compliment I ever considered he paid me. He said it with a smile, meaning, 'I adore it, but I'd never tell you that.'"

And Bea Castle? "She hated it, as a matter of fact," Kay remembers. "Bea and I had a kind of iffy relationship, although we did get along very well for two women in the same business. Martin called Bea in and showed her the Fire and Ice photo of Dorian Leigh by Avedon and asked what she thought of it. Bea looked at it and sort of didn't say anything, and so Martin said, 'Do you think it's too rich looking?' And Bea said, 'I think she looks like a little tootsie whom the Aga Khan would have spotted on the Riviera and he would have said, "Here's some money, go to Dior and blow it."' And that was Bea's comment on the photo. I had to take it to the editor of Vogue, Jessica Davies, to have her opinion on it before Martin would go with it, and she thought it was the classiest thing she had ever seen, and they did a whole issue on Fire and Ice."

Kay's original ad copy was barely changed at all, which was almost unheard of at Revlon. "Bea did add one question, which was, 'Does gypsy music make you sad?' I didn't like it, but I went along with it."

As for the famous Fire and Ice photograph: "I had had an idea of what the costume should look like," Kay says. "A long turtleneck sweater made of rhinestones. Dick [Avedon] and I always talked out all the details before we took any pictures, and he said the costume should have more contrast. I had seen a Balenciaga cape when I was in Paris and we had it copied. The dress was more of a problem, because I couldn't ask a Norell to sew on all those rhinestones, so I called a strange little man I knew who designed G-strings and clothes for strippers and gave him a hundred-and-fifty-dollar down payment. He didn't have enough help to sew on all the rhinestones, so my assistant and I sat sewing with him until we had enough for the photograph. There really was no back to the dress, just a front. If you turned the model around, there would be just a bra and a girdle and big safety pins holding it all together. We got Dorian into it, and Dick is absolutely marvelous with models. He said to her, 'How dare you look like that? How dare you look so beautiful?' And her face just lit up."

How did the average American woman score on the Fire and Ice test? "It wasn't that serious," Kay explains. "I think women had a lot more humor about themselves at that time than advertisers gave them credit for. The things that I did for Revlon I always did sort of tongue-in-cheek, feeling that women would be amused."

Fire and Ice was picked as the best ad of the year by Advertising Age.

Charles was an instinctive rather than a professional marketing man. He had little regard for a company like Procter & Gamble, even though to most marketers P&G is about as good as you can get. The modus operandi at Procter & Gamble is market research and testing. Testing new products, testing new ads, testing alternative promotions . . . the science of marketing. The modus operandi at Revlon was instinct . . . the art of marketing. Fashions changed too fast to allow test marketing. Where P&G might take four years to launch a new product, Revlon could be in national distribution in six months. Charles had to anticipate the market and run on instinct. He would get the opinions of those around him-Revlon secretaries were particularly important in this regard-and that was it. (He did test market, in a sense, by allowing his competitors to make many of the innovations -- and the mistakes -- for him.) Nor did he bother to commission market research to determine by questionnaire what women wanted, what they liked about competitive products, and how they thought of Revlon. He relied largely on his own intimate understanding of his products and of his market. He was his own walking market survey, asking questions of retailers and consumers wherever he went. He did credit himself with "sensitivity,'' but lost patience with people who ascribed his success to some sort of magic touch. As he himself put it: "Jesus Christ, I graduated from school -- I wasn't considered a genius. I never was an outstanding success from the day went to work. I never had any whatever it is. The only thing you can say about me is that if I have something to do, I'll learn everything about it -- that I will. I'm nosy as a son of a gun. I am nosy. There's nothing about it I won't learn."

Remembering their childhood, Martin says: "He was always a curious boy, he always had to ask questions -- sometimes to the disgust of Joe and me. In those days I guess we were insecure, and a guy always asking questions -- you'd say: 'Why don't you stop it by now? Why be a pest?'"

Charles had to know how things worked. If man is motivated by his need to control his environment, Charles seemed to be doubly so. And to control things, one must first understand how they work.

"If I pick up this cigarette lighter," says Robert Armstrong, picking up his gold Tiffany lighter, "to me it's something to light a cigarette with. Charles would pick it up and he'd ask what it cost. Solid gold? He'd look at the mechanism. How is it put together? He'd look at it from all angles. Why is it designed this way? What kind of hinge is there? Is there money in this? He'd make a thorough analysis, and he would learn something from this lighter that he would store away in his mind and use someday in connection with something else."

"When we went on trips together," says Mrs. Jack Friedman, "he and Jack and I would disappear. The three of us would walk around the smallest town in Greece or Italy and check out factories. If there wasn't a factory there, we'd check out a grocery store and dissect it and analyze it and talk to the owner and find out where he gets his stuff from and so on." A grocery store? Charles explained: "You must understand grocery stores, food stores, whatever it is -- it's related." At one point he became intrigued by McDonald's, and would drive around on weekends with the Friedmans' then thirteen-year-old son, watching how the McDonald's operations worked.

What's more, he was an enormous reader. Cowboy books for escape, yes, but piles of magazines of all sorts, too. "He was more up to date than anybody," says Bill Mandel.

Better than anything else, Charles knew women. Not how to live with them, maybe, or how to respect them, but how they should look and what they would buy.

"I always felt that when Charles looked at a woman, and I'm including myself, it was like being behind an X-ray machine," Kay Daly says. "Charles knew if I had a slip on, if my underwear was clean . . . About fifteen years ago he told me he had thought about it and had decided how I should dress. 'You don't have a look,' he said. 'You dress well, but you don't have a look. Any woman has to have a look. The Duchess of Windsor has a look, and like it or not, it's a look.' I was very skinny at the time, and he said, 'You've got good legs and you should always wear a plain pump and never ankle straps,' which Bea Castle wore always and he couldn't stand it -- sort of Joan Crawford shoes. He said: 'You should always wear full skirts and very wide belts and a shirtwaist top.'

"It was a very good formula for the way I was built at the time. Charles just had an innate feel for these things. He had terrible taste in furniture and decor [gold on gold], but the way a woman should look was native to him."

He had an almost irresistible urge to make people over -- men or women. He would lecture men on the virtues of jacket cuffs with buttons that really buttoned (he used to roll up his jacket sleeves along with his shirt sleeves); he would go up to women he didn't even know -- in an elevator, for example -- and say, "Excuse me, but if I may make a little criticism. . ."

"Why do you wear your hair that way?" he once asked Iris Heller, almost stamping his foot in frustration. It bothered him, as a sour note would bother a sensitive musician.

The Friedmans had Charles over for dinner one evening along with one of their sons and his date, who hadn't been to the house before. The young couple excused themselves to go out, and the older people around the table began remarking on how really beautiful the girl was. "She's going to have a double chin in ten years," Charles said. He knew.

One day Charles and Suzanne Grayson were talking and Charles looked up at her and said, "You're going to have a baby." Which was true, but "I don't think even my mother knew at the time. I knew, but I wasn't even fat, and I was sitting down when he said it -- he just knew. He was a very perceptive man." This remarkable sensitivity, combined with his Pygmaliomania, led him eventually to "redo" tens of millions of women throughout the world.