America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation (32 page)

Rushed into print in an attempt to beat its competitor to press, each Lauder life turned out to be unsatisfying and incomplete. In her book, which came out in mid-October 1985, just two weeks before Israel’s, Lauder, assisted by an uncredited ghost writer, covered just the basic facts—she finally acknowledged, for example, that she had Jewish roots. Like the other obsessives profiled in this book (with the notable exception of Ted Williams, who, with the help of a co-author, produced a moving bestseller about his personal struggles dating back to his boyhood), Lauder had little capacity for self-reflection; she provided just a two-dimensional picture of her emotional life. Like Jefferson, whose autobiography abruptly stopped in 1790 when he was in his late forties, she got bored with talking about herself halfway into her book; from that point on, the narrative turned to business tips. In contrast, while Israel did some valuable digging into her subject’s family background and key relationships,
Estée Lauder: Beyond the Magic, An Unauthorized Biography
suffered from its prosecutorial tone. Attacking Lauder as a heartless social climber, Israel failed to capture her subject’s spark and ingenuity. Israel admitted as much to me when she called her effort “a bad book.” In both the marketplace and the book pages, neither did well. Writing in the
New York Times Book Review
, Marylin Bender characterized Lauder’s prose as “gush cranked out by her publicity department” and Israel’s style as “incoherent.”

And in a curious twist, subsequent events in Israel’s own life have cast a shadow on her factual findings, which by and large come across as plausible. “I guess there is a certain irony,” Israel admitted to me, “in my questioning Estée’s veracity.” After her Lauder biography tanked, Israel descended into alcoholism and poverty; and in the early 1990s, in a desperate attempt to stay afloat, she turned to forging letters of such literary notables as Dorothy Parker and Noël Coward. This descent into criminality, for which she was convicted but not sent to prison—the penalty was five years of probation and six months’ house arrest—became the subject of Israel’s controversial 2008 memoir,
Can You Ever Forgive Me?

Besides dispelling a few common falsehoods such as the foreign birth—this Queen of Beauty was actually born to middle-class European immigrants in Queens, New York—the two biographies added little to the public’s understanding of Lauder. Israel’s publisher, Macmillan, promised several “bombshells,” nearly all of which the cosmetics tycoon acknowledged in one form or another so as to take away Israel’s thunder. (In the months preceding the launch, the rival publishers, Macmillan and Random House, kept close tabs on one another.) But by the mid-1980s, the two juiciest bits of new info—Lauder’s Jewishness and her divorce from Joseph in 1939, which was followed by remarriage in 1942—were hardly tantalizing enough to set many tongues wagging.

In retrospect, what is most revealing about Lauder’s book is what she left out. On the subject of her Jewishness, despite her promise “to be candid,” she noted only that her mother was half-Jewish; she said nothing about her father’s religion. Noting that her maternal grandmother was a French Catholic, she alluded to her “ecumenical approach to religion.” But her family was actually Jewish on both sides. And she was raised as an observant Jew, as were both of her sons. While Leonard and Ronald have long been open about
their
religious heritage—1987 saw the birth of the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation, which assists European communities ravaged by the Holocaust—only after their mother’s death in 2004 did they begin to embrace
her
Jewish identity. As Ann Friedman, director of the New York Landmarks Conservancy’s Sacred Sites Program, informed me, Leonard Lauder’s generous donations have been instrumental in restoring the Congregation Tifereth Israel—the synagogue is the oldest building in Queens—where Estée Lauder worshipped as a child a century ago. Inside are bronze plaques with the names of both her parents. (This Queens landmark also has ties to another prominent self-made woman. In 1979 and 1980, Madonna lived in the building across the street that once served as the temple’s Yeshiva.)

The careful fudging about her religious background in the autobiography underlines how much Lauder was a creature of control. Like Kinsey and Lindbergh, she sought to shape her public image, down to the smallest details. As she saw it, the story of her life was essentially the story of her brand; hence, the stakes were far from trivial. “She sold herself as a brand,” Leonard Lauder told me. “The ads say, ‘Estée Lauder says.’ Everything depended on her authority.” Her company peddled not just beauty products but a lavish lifestyle; and in post–World War II America, Lauder concluded, not entirely unreasonably, that coming out as a Jewish girl from Queens would reduce her cachet. By the mid-1980s, Lauder also had another compelling reason for describing herself as ecumenical rather than Jewish—the marketplace in the tense Middle East. At the time, the Arab League boycotted many companies that traded with Israel, and Lauder was forced to do business with one side or the other. And in contrast to her Jewish-owned competitors such as Revlon, she chose the Arabs, who were big fans of her pungent fragrances, over the Jews. Like Jefferson, she enjoyed sweating the small stuff. “God is in the details,” she would often say (though the nonreader had no idea that she was recycling a phrase often attributed to novelist Gustave Flaubert or architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe). In the end, she produced a book that was as carefully packaged as any of the lipsticks in her company’s vaunted Christmas lines.

In Lauder, this desire for control was combined with a fiercely competitive nature. “She taught me to be the best at whatever you do, even if that’s selling peanuts. Second best wasn’t good enough for her,” stated her son Ronald in a phone interview. Agnes Ash, the now nearly ninety-year-old former editor of the
Palm Beach Daily News
, who was a good friend for half a century, recalled going to a polo match with her in the 1980s to watch Prince Charles: “The conversation came around to the possibility of her sponsoring a polo team. Estée then suddenly stated out, ‘But what if they didn’t win! My products have to be associated with a winner.’”

As with other obsessives, Lauder often sought to impose her will on others. “My grandmother was a very determined woman,” William Lauder, Leonard’s son, now in his early fifties, who became the company’s CEO in 2004, noted in an interview in his office. “There were two ways to do things with her—you could do it her way, or you could compromise and do it her way,” added her grandson, who has served as executive chairman since stepping down from the top job in 2009. “My grandfather [Joseph Lauder] used to say, ‘Here we go again’ before giving in.” However, in the one-on-one of the sales arena, she knew just how far to push; and her gentle but firm persistence was precisely what made her a supersaleswoman. “Customers flocked to her because of the force of her personality. She loved people,” Leonard Lauder told me. While the first statement is undoubtedly true, the second is debatable. Her charm with customers, like Kinsey’s compassion with interviewees, did not come naturally. It was something that she turned on to achieve her objective. Away from the department store counter, she often came across as both intimidating and detached. In a recent phone interview, a retired executive who provided consulting services to her company from the 1960s to the 1980s and who did not wish to be identified, stated, “I learned never to argue with Mrs. Lauder. I had no choice but to acquiesce.” In the autobiography, she stuck in an analogous throwaway comment: “I must admit that I’m not terribly democratic in my business, and neither is my son, Leonard.”

In contrast to his mother, who never went beyond high school, the Ivy League–educated Leonard is a careful and systematic thinker. However, he shares her quirky and demanding temperament. Now eighty and one of America’s fifty wealthiest men—he’s worth more than $7 billion, according to
Forbes
—Leonard has always been fidgety. As a middle-aged man, when stuck in traffic on the highway, he used to head for the nearest exit and drive in the other direction so that he could keep moving. As Allan Mottus, a beauty industry consultant, told the
New York Times
in 1987, just as Leonard was coming out from under his mother’s shadow, “he’s secretive, confidential to the point of obsession. Leonard’s a very studied person.…He is acting a role.” Leonard has also sought tight control over media coverage. “He used to ask to review my stories before publication, but I had to tell him that we didn’t do that at the
New York Times
,” Marylin Bender told me.

 In contacting family members and former business associates for this chapter, I repeatedly came up against a kind of omertà. Many would refuse to talk, and those who did sometimes insisted on anonymity; even then, on a couple of occasions, I heard, “Leonard is going to kill me for saying this.” Given the family penchant for privacy and control, the recent sex scandal involving his son William struck Bender as “highly un-Lauder-like.” (During his five-year stint as CEO, as the
New York Post
revealed in 2007, William carried on an extra-marital affair with Manhattan socialite Taylor Stein, which resulted in “a love child.”) While Leonard built the company up by creating a well-oiled organization and focusing on the numbers—say, achieving sales goals—he was careful to preserve, as he told Harvard Business School professor Nancy Koehn in the late 1990s, “the intuitive, gutsy feel of Mrs. Estée Lauder.” So too have Leonard’s successors, including the Italian-born Fabrizio Freda, who took over as CEO in 2009.

And Estée Lauder’s sensibility, which continues to guide the company, was shaped in her Jewish childhood in Queens, which she spent her whole adult life running away from.

In her early days, America’s preeminent nose was forced to breathe in some horrific scents. Corona, Queens, where Josephine Esther Mentzer was born on July 1, 1908, was literally a dump. The Brooklyn Ash Company used the mostly working-class Italian neighborhood—the total number of Jewish residents, who had first begun settling in the still-sylvan community around 1900, then came to only 150—as the site to spill the waste collected on its railroad cars. In addition to the thick clouds of foul-smelling smoke that emanated from the smoldering refuse, the future beauty tycoon also had to inhale the stench from the manure-filled barges left at the nearby docks. “In her youth, because of all the garbage,” Queens historian Vincent Tomeo said in a recent phone interview, “Corona was known as ‘the dumps.’ It also had a serious rodent problem.”
WAR DECLARED UPON RATS
, ran the headline of a
New York Times
story, published on November 4, 1920, which discussed the plan of New York health commissioner R. S. Copeland to exterminate the rats that infested both Corona’s meadow dumps and its residential neighborhood. “Commissioner Copeland,” the paper reported, “in a communication to the Corona Civic Aid Society said inspectors of his department had found conditions to be as bad as described.” Corona would not get a serious makeover until the late 1930s, when it was selected as the venue for the World’s Fair.

“Terrible place” was the assessment rendered by Tom Buchanan, the old-monied, Yale-educated villain of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel,
The Great Gatsby
. Buchanan’s depressed proletarian mistress hails from Corona, which the novelist described as a “valley of ashes…bounded on one side by a small foul river.” One of the early titles of the Fitzgerald classic was “Among the Ash Heaps and the Millionaires.” To cross over to the ranks of the millionaires, Esther (or Estelle, as she was then also called—no one ever referred to her as Josephine) would completely erase her past, just like the self-made financier Jay Gatsby, who, as Fitzgerald wrote, “sprang from his Platonic conception of himself.”

Her mother, Rose Schotz, was a Hungarian Jew who had immigrated to America, accompanied by her five children, in 1898. In New York City, the twenty-nine-year-old Rose was reunited with her Hungarian husband, Abraham Rosenthal. But a few years later, Rosenthal was gone.

A struggling single mother with little education—as census records reveal, she could neither read nor write—and in a strange land, Rose Schotz was beside herself with grief. As Rose later said little about what happened other than to label this blow a “burden,” Lauder was never sure whether her mother’s first husband died or simply abandoned the family; the latter scenario was more likely, as she would acknowledge in her memoir.

This loss compounded the other major events that Rose had endured back in Hungary. When she was a little girl, her mother dropped dead after eating a spider hidden in a cup of water drawn from a well. Rose was then reared by a nasty stepmother. To escape her unhappy family predicament, she had run off with Rosenthal, an older cousin, at the age of fifteen.

But before Rose could give in to despair, she was rescued by a knight in shining armor—though he did not joust, he was quite the able equestrian—another Jewish immigrant from Hungary, Max Mentzer (the family name was derived from the German city of Mainz). With her second husband, Rose had two more children, Grace (called Renée) and Esther. Mentzer first worked as a tailor and did other odd jobs. The 1920 census identified him as a driver for a bakery. In the early 1920s, he opened up a hardware store at 107th Street and Corona Avenue, above which the family lived. His new business venture did well, and by 1930, as census records show, the family’s real estate was worth a hefty $50,000 ($650,000 today). As his fortunes improved, Mentzer also built a stable next to the house. In the late 1930s—after Lauder had gotten married—Mentzer would move into the largely Jewish Washington Heights section of Manhattan and become the director of the Beth El Cemetery in Paramus, New Jersey; at his new place of employment, he could show off his equestrian skills by taking mourners (and family members) on horseback rides. The entire family, including Lauder, is buried there.

Though Lauder finally did cough up the key facts about her childhood in her autobiography, she still spun several hard-to-believe yarns; a few revolved around the supposedly aristocratic backgrounds of her parents. She claimed that the Austrian emperor Franz Joseph had personally selected Mentzer as the man whom one of his nieces should marry—an offer he allegedly declined because the bride-to-be weighed three hundred pounds. Lauder also insisted that her mother went to spas in Carlsbad and Baden-Baden for beauty treatment—though the family had some means by the early 1930s, it’s highly unlikely that she or her husband ever traveled back to Europe. (For Jews of that generation, Germany was not exactly a favorite tourist destination.) And while Lauder stated that her mother spoke “a very broken English, with a predominantly German accent,” that phrase is misleading. Yiddish was the mother tongue of both her parents, as noted on the 1920 census, and was the language spoken at home. Years later, Lauder could still hold her own in Yiddish, though she never let the press know.