America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation (33 page)

While the tall, handsome, and affable Mentzer was the answer to Rose’s prayers, one gnawing problem remained: her traumatic anxiety. She was terrified of being abandoned by Max just as she had been by her first husband (and by her mother, who had suddenly died on her). And her fear that her dashing husband might run off with another woman was magnified by the difference in their ages—he was a full decade younger.

In an effort to hold on to her man, Rose engaged in an elaborate beauty ritual as soon as he left the house in the morning. “My mother began brushing her hair,” Lauder later wrote, “even before she opened her eyes.” Rose was obsessed with staying attractive and young looking.

And just as the young Henry Heinz became “his mother’s little helper,” Esther became her mother’s little personal beauty assistant. “My very first memory,” Lauder later wrote, “is of my mother’s scent, her aura of freshness, the perfume of her presence.…Her hair didn’t escape my attention, either. As soon as I was old enough to hold a brush, I’d give her no peace.” A script was thus implanted into little Esther’s brain, one which Estée Lauder would replay time and time again. She would always equate her own well-being with her ability to help the women in her midst look their best.

The lifelong addiction to making up women was already under way in early childhood. “Esty, you’ve already brushed my hair three times today,” her mother would complain. Likewise, her irked father would oft repeat, “Stop fiddling with other people’s faces.” Once she started going to school, the first thing Esther would do when she got home was pat the face of her older sister, Renée, with her mother’s skin cream.

“But this is what I liked to do—touch other people’s faces, no matter who they were,” Lauder wrote in her autobiography, “touch them and make them pretty. Before I’m finished, I’ll set, I’m certain, the world’s record for face touching.” This feat she would accomplish, just as Kinsey would set records for collecting both galls and sex histories.

For Lauder, the obsession with glowing skin and shining eyes was forever tied to her own deepest needs for love and connection. If she could only keep her mother beautiful, little Esty must have thought, she could keep her family together and thus guarantee herself the love of both her parents. “My mother was so beautiful that a man fifteen years younger married her,” she told the
New York Times
in 1967, stretching the truth by five years. “Now my purpose is to keep women looking younger and younger.” This pursuit was not just what Lauder ended up doing for a living; it became her reason for living. And her obsession could translate into a phenomenal living because her mother’s predicament was universal; while Rose Mentzer’s fear of abandonment was extreme, many women share her dread of aging and losing their looks. Like Heinz, who targeted his products to stressed-out mothers eager to put fresh food on the table, Lauder could also tap into a huge market.

While the adult Lauder would describe herself as the “coddled baby of the family,” the evidence suggests otherwise. Like Lindbergh, she came from a topsy-turvy family where the traditional child and parent roles were reversed. As a child, she kept herself busy tending to the needs of her anxious parents, particularly her mother. And like other obsessives who received little nurturing, she took on various adult responsibilities at an early age. Just like Melvil Dewey, who compiled an inventory of the items in his father’s general store, as a teenager Esther organized the wares in her father’s hardware store. Mothering her own parents would be a lifelong assignment. In the 1950s, when the forty-something executive was zipping across the country on sales trips, she would feel compelled to call Max and Rose nearly every night to allay
their
anxiety about her stressful existence.

And the little girl eager to please her parents would evolve into a merchant eager to please patrons. “Let’s listen to our customer,” she would state in a lecture to fashion students toward the end of her life. “She’s trying to tell us something—and the word she is trying to tell us is
service
.”

In her autobiography, Lauder summed up her childhood as nearly idyllic. In her cheery rendering, the only blot was “the specter of an infantile paralysis epidemic [that] loomed over New York.” Due to this public health catastrophe, the anxious Rose fled with her two preteens to the home of Sarah Gottlieb—her younger sister—in Milwaukee for several months. Lauder did not mention the date of the move, but it was probably in or around 1916; from June to November that year, the death toll in New York City from polio amounted to a staggering 2,407 persons, 98 percent of whom were children under sixteen. Of the five boroughs, Queens was hardest hit; its death rate was .90 per 1,000 residents, more than twice the average for the city as a whole and three times more than that of Manhattan. New York’s Department of Health attributed the epidemic to “insects migrating by themselves or on the body of some animal host like a rat”—a widely circulated conclusion that must have left Esther feeling even more ashamed about her borough of origin. Like Kinsey, so too was this neatnik and order freak created at least in part from early exposure to too much dirt and to too many rats.

But Lauder would never acknowledge any of this angst. All she mentioned about the epidemic was that after the family’s return from Milwaukee, Renée contracted polio and had to wear a brace until she turned fifteen. “When trouble struck,” she wrote, “my sister, not I, absorbed the blow.” In her autobiography, she also said nothing else about Milwaukee except for that quick allusion to her stay there when she was around ten. But she would actually go back to live with her relatives a decade later and work as “a little clean-up girl” in beauty shops. In interviews in the 1960s and 1970s, Lauder would occasionally reference Milwaukee sojourns, but she would embellish her rather modest living conditions with her aunt Sarah. “In Milwaukee,” she told the
New York Times
in 1967, “a woman used to come to our house every day just to brush my mother’s hair.”  

As a girl, her role models were not her parents, but the Leppel sisters—Fanny and Frieda. Eleven years older than Esther, Fanny was married to her half brother Isidor; Frieda was Fanny’s older sister and was married to another Isidore. Together with their husbands, the two sisters transformed their father’s dry-goods store—originally called Leppel’s, it was renamed Pflaker and
Rosentha
l—into a department store that became known as “the Macy’s of Corona.” “Pflaker and Rosenthal,” Lauder later wrote, “was my gateway to fancy. It was Dress-up Land for me. I loved to play with the beautiful clothes.” S
chmoozing
with the Jewish customers in Yiddish and the Italians in Neapolitan, Fanny and Frieda were skilled saleswomen who knew how to move product. “I whetted my appetite for the merry ring of a cash register,” Lauder later observed. “I learned early that being a perfectionist and providing quality was the only way to do business.”

In the Leppel, Rosenthal, and Mentzer families, traditional gender roles were turned inside out. The women often took the initiative; the men, in contrast, tended to be less ambitious and to patrol the kitchen. One of Lauder’s relatives, who did not wish to be identified, told me: “Ours was a matriarchal family. Fanny and Frieda ran the store.” Now in his late sixties, this family member recalled attending a Passover Seder with Estée Lauder and her parents in the 1950s: “Her father, Max, made the best matzah balls. They were tight and firm like cannonballs. They sank right to the bottom. Fantastic.”

In contrast to her father, Esther did not like to cook. “One day, in the mid-1960s, while I was walking along Worth Avenue in Palm Beach, Lauder drove up to me in her pale blue Cadillac and invited me over to her English-style mansion for ‘some tea and Sara Lee.’ I was stunned,” Marylin Bender told me. Lauder’s lack of a food sense has been confirmed by numerous other sources. As her granddaughter Aerin recalled, “When we used to visit her in Florida, she would insist on hot lunches. She would prepare for us her favorite foods—spaghetti and meatballs and hot dogs, which she called frankfurters.” In her house in southern France, her American maid would serve caviar on Ritz crackers.

As an adolescent, Esther ventured into the kitchen not to work on matzah balls with her father but to assist her uncle John—her mother’s younger brother—as he produced his skin cream over the gas stove. During World War I, John Schotz, a chemist who may have had a Ph.D., was visiting from Hungary, and he decided to stay in America. “I loved his creams, loved his potions,” Lauder later wrote. She now had a new excuse to go on face-touching binges. In high school, Esther didn’t have “a single friend who wasn’t slathered in our creams,” as the beauty tycoon later put it. “If someone had a slight redness just under her nose…she’d come to visit.”

In the mid-1920s, at about the same time Esther was finishing Newtown High School in Corona, Schotz set up a laboratory on West Forty-Second Street in Manhattan, where he manufactured several beauty products such as a Six-in-One Cold Cream. While Schotz was a clever inventor, he had no idea how to sell anything. But Esther would figure that one out. Renamed “Super-Rich All Purpose Crème,” Schotz’s signature concoction would later emerge as the bedrock of Lauder’s own burgeoning beauty business. “All [her products,]” the
New York Times
would report in 1959, “are based on formulas that Mrs. Lauder’s uncle, a dermatologist, turned over to her.” (A decade later, she would invent a few more analogous relatives, telling the
Boston Globe
that her beauty empire was launched with a face pack devised by her “four Viennese doctor uncles.”) According to Schotz’s nephew, Alan Carlan, the chemist did recall giving her the formulas. However, Carlan was not sure if Schotz, who died penniless, ever received a share of the profits.

In the late 1920s, while vacationing in the family’s tiny bungalow in Mohegan Lake in New York’s Westchester County, Esther, then nearly twenty, met her first beau, Joseph Lauter, a man six years older, whose parents were also Jews from Eastern Europe. After studying accounting and shorthand at New York’s High School of Commerce, Joe launched a series of small businesses that sold everything from buttons to textiles; none would do particularly well. (She would later also remove the blemishes from his résumé, telling the
Boston Globe
that Joe was “a Wall Street financial consultant” when she first met him.) But he was cordial and kind, and that was what won her heart. “All at once I felt noticed, cherished, grown-up, amused, amusing, happy,” she later wrote. Everyone seemed to feel comfortable around Joe. “He was very approachable and easy to talk to,” a relative told me. As the years went on, his unflappable demeanor may have been aided by alcohol, as Lauder herself appeared to acknowledge. In her autobiography, she noted that Joe had “a royal constitution for holding down four or five Scotches without visible effect.”

After a three-year courtship, they were married on January 15, 1930, at the Royal Palms Ballroom on 135th Street and Broadway in West Harlem, then a Jewish neighborhood. While Lauder would later claim that her wedding picture appeared in the rotogravure section of the
New York Times
, the couple was not yet that socially prominent. That month, the
Times
did mention a “Mr. and Mrs. J. H. Lauter,” among the recent arrivals at the Bermudiana Hotel, in Bermuda, where they spent their honeymoon. But the couple initially lacked the funds to move into an abode of their own. The 1930 census, taken a few months later, listed them as living in Corona along with her parents as well as with her sister and her husband, Herman Shapiro.

In March 1933, a couple of years after the couple had made the move to their own modest apartment on the West Side of Manhattan, Leonard Allan Lauter was born. The woman who had not been the beneficiary of much mother love dreaded the prospect of being cooped up alone at home with her son. Like the male icons profiled in this book, her identity would come primarily from pursuing her obsessions and compulsions rather than from nurturing others. “It was not enough,” she later wrote, “for me to stay home and play Mommy.” She preferred “mothering my zeal for experimenting with my uncle’s creams,” which she continued to cook up in her kitchen. Lauder also began performing in small parts at the Cherry Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village. “She was not much of a success as an actress,” her grandson William Lauder stated. “But she took something from that experience. She learned how to tell stories in the retail environment.” For Lauder, teaching women about how to take care of their skin would always have a dramatic element. “Pure theater—in the end, that’s what it was, this rendering of beauty,” she would later write.

She got her first chance a few years later. As a young mother, she enjoyed getting her hair done once a month at the House of Ash Blondes, a beauty salon on the Upper West Side run by Florence Morris. One day, in response to a question from Mrs. Morris about how she kept her skin so lovely, Lauder promised to bring in her beauty products. A few weeks later, the excited customer could not wait until her next scheduled visit. She returned to the House of Ash Blondes with four of her uncle’s concoctions—the cream, a cleansing oil, skin lotion, and face powder—and applied a few dabs from each one directly onto Mrs. Morris’s face. An impressed Mrs. Morris offered her a small counter at the new salon that she was opening on East Sixtieth Street. “This was my first chance at a real business,” Lauder later wrote. “I would pay her rent; whatever I sold would be mine to keep. No partners (I never did have partners).” Like the Lone Eagle, Lauder would be characterologically incapable of flying with a copilot and would make her mark without one. When her company was formed a decade later, she and her husband agreed to “be equal partners in every sense of the word.” But her true feelings are more likely contained in that parenthetical aside. As a good obsessive, equality was anathema to her, and she would wield considerable control over her future partners—Joe and Leonard.

And she would put her new name, Estée Lauder, on her jars, which were at first black and white. (Several years later, after doing some snooping around in the homes of her rich friends and clients to determine “what color would look wonderful in any bathroom,” she would switch to pale turquoise, aka “Estée Lauder blue.”) This perfectionist who would later put considerable energy into coming up with le mot juste to describe her products—think of Youth Dew, which held the promise of rolling back the clock by natural means—first had to name herself. She wanted to sound old-Europey, if not French, and “Esther” had to go. However, she would never acknowledge that her new name was her own creation. In a 1969 interview with the
Boston Globe
, she stated that a nurse at the hospital where she was born was responsible for “the very chic” mistake. In her autobiography, she came up with another story, claiming that an “enterprising” Corona schoolteacher gave her the accent when her father tried to register her in grade school. But there is no indication that this budding entrepreneur was ever known as Estée until “Estée Lauder” first popped up in the Manhattan phone book in 1937. Of her new last name, she asserted that “Joe and I decided that we would return his name to the integrity of the original.” But the decision may not have been mutual, as Joe still went by Lauter for a few more years. And her claim that Lauder was a return to the original spelling “in Austria where Joe’s father was born” is contradicted by the 1930 census, which listed Joe’s father’s place of birth as Russia. Even if the Lauter family name was originally spelled as she said it was, given her tendency to run away from—rather than embrace—her family’s origins, her desire to come across as less Jewish must also be considered a possible reason for this tweak.