America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation (11 page)

Heinz would put his heart into his marketing efforts. “Swing [Heinz] sign today across First Avenue,” the tape-measure aficionado proudly noted in his diary on May 18, 1878, “18 feet long by 15 feet high, lettering…Pickles, Vinegar, Mustard.… It is all made of wire and cost $40.” While the denizens of Pittsburgh were initially startled by this larger-than-life advertisement, they soon accepted it. Heinz would continue to tout his products each year at the Pittsburgh exposition; and he would serve as a vice president of the civic organization that staged it for fifteen years. His varieties were like his children, and like a proud father, he couldn’t stop talking them up. (After the birth of his fourth child, Clifford, he celebrated by launching “Clifford’s Worcester Sauce,” and a few years later, he named a brand of ketchup after his teenage son, Howard.) While Heinz could always find money for advertising, he scrimped elsewhere. In the middle of 1878, on a trip to Chicago, he plopped down only $17 for a blue suit because, as he noted, he was “trying to save.” As he also acknowledged in his diary, he typically wore his suits every day for a couple of years.

Thanks to Heinz’s remarkable ingenuity and drive—the smooth-talking salesman, who was not averse to staying up all night to get off orders, was constantly riding the rails to open up new markets—after just a year, the F. & J. Heinz Company was worth $14,000, up nearly fivefold. Having regained his financial footing, in the fall of 1877, a few weeks after Howard’s birth, Heinz moved from Sharpsburg to a row house in downtown Pittsburgh that was close to his factory. But two years later, the neatnik would acknowledge his error and move back. “Am delighted with the change of coming to Sharpsburg,” he noted in April 1879. “It seems more like living than to be stuck into the dirt in the heart of the Smoky City.” Even though his business was now a smashing success, his anxiety level remained high. “My head feels dull, all over top of head and forehead,” Heinz wrote that same April. “Am trying not to work too hard, but fear it is almost too late.” Yet his new nervous crises would not produce boils, and he could move on to counting and measuring outgrowths of his prosperity. In early 1879, he began tallying the number of homeless men to whom he gave free meals at his firm. “I resolved to keep an account,” he reported in his diary, after noting that he had served forty-three tramps and beggars in the thirty-one days of January, “and had the girl mark 1 on a piece of paper for all that were fed.” The following year, he fixated on the dimensions of the iron safes that he bought both Irene and Clarence for Christmas—“twelve by nine by seven inches.”

While revenues soared—in 1884, sales came to a staggering $43,000 ($860,000)—the workplace remained full of conflict. After 1880, when J. W. Ulam, one of his best employees, left to start his own pickle company, an embittered Heinz would no longer consider giving upper management positions to anyone outside the family; even so, he couldn’t make peace with either of his titular bosses, his brother John and cousin Frederick. Heinz would repeatedly lash out at John for not working hard enough. Assuming that any sensible person would share his all-consuming interest in business, Heinz accused his brother of “driving more nails in my coffin than all other cares.” He was incredulous that John wasn’t eager to be at his post at the manufacturing division when it opened at 7 a.m. (At this stage of his career, Heinz himself typically reported for work at 9 a.m., roughly the same time as his brother.) In April 1887, in a curious attempt to “encourage Brother John,” Heinz started commuting to the city on the 6 a.m. train. In response, John felt discouraged and wanted out. After Anna Heinz sided with her firstborn and put pressure on John to comply with Henry’s whims, outside arbitrators stepped in and worked out the separation agreement. In 1888, Frederick also liberated himself from Henry’s clutches and sold his share. H. J. Heinz and his company were now officially one and the same.

Heinz also had a tumultuous relationship with his brother Peter, who was the F. & J. Heinz Company’s first “traveler” (traveling salesman). P.J., as H.J. called him, proved to be more than capable. “He [Peter] surpasses all of our agents,” Heinz noted in 1884, as his brother began selling bulk goods by wagon in Cincinnati. But despite being whisked by Heinz to temperance meetings, Peter continued to drink and chase women. In the spring of 1886, Heinz dashed off to Washington and “snatched him [Peter] away from where he was to be married. P.J. escaped.” This was not actually the first time that Heinz had unhitched his brother from a wayward woman—and not even the first time in Washington. (Nine years earlier in the nation’s capital, P.J. had shacked up with a divorced woman and her daughter above a saloon.) In an attempt to cure his brother’s ills, Heinz sent him off to Germany that spring, where Peter soon found a potential mate, Pauline Merz, of whom the family could approve. Remarkably, after all his efforts to get Peter to keep to the straight and narrow, Heinz nearly sabotaged this union. That summer, in Wiesbaden, a few days before the wedding was to take place, the impulsive and aggrieved Heinz could not resist badmouthing the groom. As soon as he met the bride’s parents, he let it rip. “I tell them plainly,” Heinz wrote in his diary, “how P.J. is so that no reflections can be made.” Fortunately, the Merzes were already aware of Peter’s past, and the ceremony went on as planned.

After his marriage, Peter reestablished himself as a leading salesman. But while he no longer was seducing stray women, he continued to drink. In 1899, Heinz got a letter from a top company executive who stated that out “of all the cases [of alcoholism] that he has ever had in his life time, P.J. surpasses them all” and urged that “action should be taken to save our business.” In the fall of 1900, after a Pinkerton detective, hired by Heinz, had followed Peter around as he went barhopping in Manhattan, his brother was forced to retire at the age of forty-nine.

Heinz’s 1886 European trip was part medical vacation, part Protestant
pilgrimage
—he would sit in John Wesley’s house in London and visit Martin Luther’s church in Wittenberg—and part a return to his roots. In his father’s hometown of Kallstadt, he would visit a myriad of uncles, aunts, cousins, nieces, and nephews, “a total of over 100 relatives,” as he would dutifully count (and then recount in his journal). But business was never too far from his mind. Upon his arrival in Liverpool, Heinz systematically examined the windows of all the grocery shops and “saw no pickle displays.” “I have learned little,” the disappointed entrepreneur noted after his three-day visit, “in this city which I can utilize in America to advantage.”

England’s capital would be a different story. After taking the family to see the major sites, including the Houses of Parliament (which he described as “a beautiful structure and very large”—too large, no doubt, to measure the numbers), Buckingham Palace (“a plain structure”), and Regent’s Park (“alive with people”), he enjoyed making the rounds of the pickle, glass, and vinegar factories. And then on Friday, June 18, 1886, at the end of his first week, Heinz made history. Decked out in his best tail coat (made by a British tailor in Philadelphia) and top hat, the supersalesman paid a call to Fortnum and Mason, the still-vibrant British grocer that has been catering to the royal family out of its Piccadilly Street store since 1707. Armed with a Gladstone bag containing “seven varieties of our finest and newest goods,” he strode through the front door rather than through the service entrance, as was customary for English salesmen of the era. “Resisting the temptation to take out the tape measure (but the Georgian doorway was so beautifully proportioned),” as a British chronicler, attuned to his quirks, has put it, Heinz asked to see the head of grocery purchasing. Tasting the samples—the horseradish, the ketchup, and chili sauce—the head couldn’t resist, stating, “I think, Mr. Heinz, we will take all of them.”

“1ST SALE IN ENGLAND,” reported a jubilant Heinz in his diary.

English exports initially constituted only a small fraction of his business. And the massive four-story Farrington Road Heinz headquarters, opened in 1898, hemorrhaged shillings for several years. But by 1906, led by baked beans, which Heinz himself loved to devour, English sales reached a quarter of a million dollars. Americans had first learned of beans during the Civil War, and the Heinz Company began mass-producing them in the mid-1890s. Its clever “beans and toast” campaign would forever revamp the morning meal throughout the British Empire. “At breakfast or dinner,” ran a 1910 ad that circulated widely in England’s northern factory belt, “see that your plate is filled with Heinz Baked Beans with Tomato Sauce. It builds up brain, body and muscle. The bean is Nature’s most nourishing food.” The Brits, who had once assumed that beans were meant for horses, were now largely convinced that they were the invention of a European company. In the twenty-first century, the United Kingdom still consumes more canned beans per capita than any other nation in the world.

A century before globalization, Heinz figured out that the future of his business rested on ringing up foreign sales. “I was the only one,” he reflected toward the end of his life, “who had any faith in the future development of the 57 through a branch house in England.” “Our market is the world,” ran Heinz’s “Important Idea Number Four.” Between 1890 and 1915, he would take a long European trip every year but four. And by the start of the Great War, the compulsive world traveler would have agencies up and running on every continent but Antarctica. His advertising wouldn’t be limited to America; countless Germans would gaze daily at his massive thirty-eight-foot-by-sixty-nine-foot sign over the Rhine River. Long before Starbucks, McDonald’s, or even Coca-Cola, Heinz would reign as the most recognizable brand on earth. As Sebastian Mueller, Heinz’s brother-in-law and trusty deputy for decades, once put it, Heinz products were sold wherever there were “civilized people.”

In an effort to extend his global reach, Heinz kept mounting bigger and more elaborate exhibits at international expositions in both Europe and America, racking up a staggering total of fifty-five gold medals by 1904. At the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the Heinz booth attracted such a flood of visitors that, as the
New York Times
reported, at the conclusion of this World’s Fair, “it was… discovered that the gallery floor… sagged…where the pickle display of the H. J. Heinz Company stood.”

But were it not for the quick thinker’s quick thinking, the exquisite Heinz Pavilion in Chicago, which was made out of hand-carved oak and staffed by four beautiful women from different corners of the world, would have been a huge dud. In June 1893, a few weeks after the fair’s official opening, Heinz took the family to Chicago (where their week’s stay in sumptuous quarters, as he recorded in his diary, came to “$112 without food”). Heading over to the Agricultural Building, Heinz was stunned to see that almost nobody was at his exhibit. Taking an evening to diagnose the problem, Heinz realized that visitors were unwilling to hike up the forty-four steps to the second floor. As with his moment of genius on the Manhattan elevated train a few years later, Heinz concluded that the nearest lithography shop could provide a solution. He ordered small white cards that promised the bearer a free souvenir when presented at the Heinz Pavilion. These cards, which resembled baggage checks, were passed out all over the fair by a squadron of young boys. Thousands of people were now eager to parade up the stairs, where they picked up a one-and-a-quarter-inch green pickle pin, tasted his samples, and viewed his array of curios and antiquities. “A great hit,” Heinz later wrote in his diary. “We hear it from all sources.” By November, when fair officials noticed that the gallery had almost collapsed, despite their efforts to strengthen its foundation over the summer, Heinz had distributed a million pickle pins, causing the
Saturday Evening Post
to describe this marketing bonanza “as one of the most famous giveaways in merchandising history.” It was the gift that kept on giving something back to the giver, as the potential customers who pinned the distinctive gutta-percha pickles on their shirts and blouses all became walking Heinz billboards.

The following year, in late January, a “very tired and worn” Heinz tried to soothe his “nervous stomach and head ache” by embarking on a grueling five-and-a-half-month trek across the Middle East and Europe. Accompanying the forty-nine-year-old entrepreneur were his two eldest children, Clarence and Irene, as well as Irene’s close friend Myra Boyd; bothered by rheumatism, the now 205-pound Sallie wasn’t feeling up to all the exertion. Heinz took his new Kodak camera, but his tape measure captured the moments that meant the most to him. “Measures over 13 feet at the base,” he wrote of the Pillar of Pompey in Alexandria. After riding his camel to the Great Sphinx at Giza, he noted, “Measured some blocks 18 feet long, 6 feet thick, all in perfect condition.” Of the statue of Ramesses II, the largest in Egypt, Heinz determined that the “ear measures 3 ½ feet” and “the first finger 3 feet in diameter.” The Vatican provided him with lots of juicy factoids to keep track of—22 courtyards, 11,000 rooms, 23,000 windows, 10,000 statues, and 1,000 employees. “We are delighted,” the serial counter wrote of his visit to St. Peter’s Church, “with our climb to the top of the Dome, 715 steps.” His only disappointment in Rome was his failure to gain an audience with the Pope—the rector of the American College, to whom he had written for help, couldn’t pull it off. In July 1894, the curio collector and his many purchases—“six shipments and a mummy”—sailed back on the
City of Paris
, where he fraternized with Mark Twain (“medium height, say 5 feet 7 inches,” Heinz noted, checking the impulse to whip out his favorite implement and record the author’s exact dimensions).

Not long after Heinz’s return, Sallie became gravely ill with typhoid pneumonia. On Thursday, November, 29, 1894—Thanksgiving—she died at Greenlawn, the thirty-room chateaulike estate in Pittsburgh’s East End, which Heinz had recently bought and remodeled. She was fifty-one. To his eldest son, Clarence, then in Munich, a devastated Heinz could barely describe “the awfulness of what has befallen us.” For obsessives, who have great difficulty connecting with others, the death of a trusted (that is, subservient) longtime spouse is particularly disorienting; the experience is akin to that of a preadolescent losing his or her mother. As he slowly recovered, Heinz was forced to rearrange his priorities. While he would never stop overseeing his company, in 1895 he handed over many management responsibilities to Sebastian Mueller. He also began immersing himself in the activities of the World Sunday School Association. “Sunday School,” he later wrote, “is the world’s greatest living force for character building and good citizenship.” To cope with his grief, like Jefferson after the loss of his beloved Martha, Heinz stepped up his collecting and organizing. “Well, how is the Royal Kingdom?” Howard wrote to his father in the summer of 1896. “I hope you did not get any curios, but I suppose you got some, you couldn’t help it.” When the fourth floor of his Greenlawn mansion could no longer contain his thousands of impressive tchotchkes—among his timepieces were Lord Horatio Nelson’s personal watch—he erected a private museum next to the garage and opened it to the public.