America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation (8 page)

Henry Heinz outside his plant on the north side of Pittsburgh in 1907, when he was sixty-three. Heinz loved to ride as well as to collect horses. At the H. J. Heinz headquarters, he built a three-story “equine palace,” which housed his company’s fleet of two hundred black Percherons.

(Photo source: Henry Heinz on a horse. Ca. 1907. H. J. Heinz Company. Reprinted by permission of the Library and Archives Division, Sen. John Heinz History Center.)

I
t was Tuesday, May 25, 1886, and Henry J. Heinz was in Pittsburgh’s Union Depot, waiting for the nine o’clock overnight train to Jersey City. The forty-one-year-old entrepreneur was about to take his family—his wife, Sallie; and their four children, Irene (fourteen), Clarence (thirteen), Howard (eight), and Clifford (two); along with his sister Mary and sister-in-law Lizzie—on a three-month European tour. Heinz could afford the extravagant vacation because business at his ten-year-old food company, F. & J. Heinz, was booming. Sales, which had started out at $44,000 ($880,000 today) in 1876, were up to nearly $500,000 ($10 million). Moreover, Heinz’s expansion plans were rapidly paying dividends. Two years earlier, he had invested $20,000 ($400,000) in a factory on Pittsburgh’s North Side, and Americans were now jumping at the chance to buy his newest product, bottled vinegar.

As the Heinz clan stood on the platform, they heard a couple of farewell speeches. The first came from one of the country’s best-known Methodist preachers, Heinz’s close friend Pittsburgh’s Reverend Ezra Morgan Wood, who had delivered a sermon at President Abraham Lincoln’s funeral. Afterward, an F. & J. Heinz executive read a letter signed by thirty-four employees, expressing the “earnest wish that he, his family and company…may have an enjoyable time and that a kind providence may have them all in his safe keeping during their absence and that in due time each and all of them may be returned much improved in health.” As was no secret to any of Heinz’s nearly five hundred employees, this trip was to be, in part, a medical vacation. With the temperamental paterfamilias battling chronic anxiety, his wife Sallie arthritis, and his eldest son Clarence asthma, the stop in Germany would be full of consultations with the cutting-edge physicians located in the family’s ancestral homeland.

Four days later, the Heinz traveling party boarded the
City of Berlin
, the German steamer bound for Liverpool, some 3,100 miles away. Though removed from the pressures of his office, the five-and-a-half-footer with the sparkling blue eyes, whose curly dark hair and fluffy moustache were both starting to gray, could not relax either in his sumptuous accommodations—the two adjoining staterooms—or on deck. Instead, over the course of the eight-day journey, Heinz kept marching around on various fact-finding missions, whose results he dutifully recorded in his diary. The off-duty entrepreneur learned everything he could about Captain F. S. Land—his career at sea was already in its fourth decade—and his method of commanding his crew of eighty-two. Heinz also studied how the engine worked and set the speed. But what most interested him were the ship’s statistics. The eleven-year-old paddle wheeler, which consumed 900 tons of coal every twenty-four hours, had 900 horsepower and was, he learned, 488 feet long, 44 feet wide, and 34 feet deep. And of its 422 passengers, 140 rode in steerage, 125 in intermediate, and 157 in saloon.

This was not the first or only time that a restless Heinz was seized by the impulse to quantify. “He was a man,” his chauffeur would recall after his death, “who was always measuring things.” Ever since adolescence, when he began working in his father’s brick factory, Heinz toted a steel tape measure in his front pocket, which he would often whip out to jot down the dimensions of a doorway or some object that captured his fancy. “Every man,” Heinz would insist, “should carry a tape measure with him.” Of numbers, he never seemed to get enough. For Heinz, as for Jefferson, to quantify was to take charge; counting was how he kept his massive interpersonal anxiety at bay. When he visited the Rouen Cathedral in that summer of 1886, he counted all 722 steps that led up to the top of its 495-foot tower, then one of the highest in the world. In his diary, he carefully tracked his weight, which oscillated between 127 and 159 pounds, depending on his stress level—he tended to lose weight when overworked—and whether he wore his quarter-pound derby hat (a measure that he would take whenever the final tally was in danger of ending in a messy three-fourths pound). Like other obsessives such as Steve Jobs, who waged a long battle with anorexia, Heinz saw his own body as a foreign object over which he needed to exert control. And Heinz also kept close tabs on the weight of other family members. In 1891, when both Irene and Clarence left home for college, they clocked in at 108 and 152, respectively. While Sallie’s wedding weight is unknown—her husband’s diary began several years after their 1869 union—the once trim Mrs. Heinz was up to 153 during that European sojourn and would balloon to 205 by the time of her death in 1894.

To date, just about every profile of Heinz turns this nervous tic inside out, using his measuring mania as proof that the tycoon was a paragon of both sanity and sagacity. E. D. McCafferty, Heinz’s former secretary who published a brief life in 1923, is alluding to the various factoids that Heinz recorded on the
City of Berlin
when he argues that these “diary entries…reveal character.” Of this same episode, Robert Alperts, who was handpicked by Henry Heinz II, the founder’s grandson, to write the first scholarly biography a half century later, observes, “Heinz enthusiastically wrote down in his diary the statistics that one must know and record on such an occasion.” (Imagine riding on an ocean liner without ready access to the ship’s precise dimensions. Perish the thought!) Remarkably, even those not under the watchful eye of some Heinz heir parrot the same line. In describing the 1886 voyage to Liverpool, Quentin Skrabec Jr., author of a 2009 biography, compares Heinz’s journals to those of “a scientist such as Thomas Edison.”

“I like to know,” Heinz would insist, “what I’m talking about. No use guessing if you can get the exact facts.” But in truth, he liked meaningless factoids as much as hard data. Numbers, no matter what they measured, provided the reassurance and comfort that he could not find elsewhere—namely, in emotional connections with other human beings.

Like the Wizard of Menlo Park, Heinz was a genius, but his was a lightning-quick, impulsive intelligence, not a probing one. He was a doer rather than a thinker. An impatient man, he was constantly on the go. When he played golf, his rounds lasted just six holes. If his ride across “the big Pond,” as he called it, was too smooth, he got downright uncomfortable. “We had several days of delightful motion,” he once reported to his wife while traversing the Atlantic on a steamship, “which I confess broke the monotony of eating and too much merriment.” Like Jefferson, he had an urgent need to keep his mind occupied at all times, even if that meant taking on stressful or demanding tasks. Unable to sit still, Heinz rarely spent twenty consecutive minutes at his desk. While Heinz also shared Jefferson’s hatred of idleness, he rarely escaped into books because reading gave him a headache. In his diary, which he kept for about twenty years, Heinz mentioned only one book,
The Successful Merchant
, a biography of a nineteenth-century British grocer steeped in the principles of Methodism. (“New food for my…desires,” Heinz commented upon finishing this rags-to-riches tale some five months after he started it.) And the man whose postsecondary education consisted of a few bookkeeping classes at Duff’s Mercantile College in Pittsburgh was practically incapable of writing a coherent business letter. Nor did he master orthography (in contrast to his bookish wife, Sallie, who could hold her own in spelling bees).
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On a visit to Corsica, Heinz consoled himself by noting in his diary, “Napoleon couldn’t spell, either.” Heinz would always distrust the college educated. In the early 1900s, as consumers began worrying about the additives that companies were tossing into ketchup, his partners would have to hire chemists behind his back.

But while Heinz’s nervous temperament was incompatible with scientific discovery, it was ideally suited to building and running a business. Upon his death in 1919, “the Pickle King”—as the
New York Times
described him in its obituary—left behind the world’s largest manufacturer of processed food, with annual sales exceeding $20 million ($400 million in today’s dollars). By then, the H. J. Heinz Company, as the firm was renamed in 1888, employed 6,253 workers in twenty-five branch factories and was selling its products in dozens of countries. This pioneer in the art of branding had an intuitive feel for the consumer’s needs and wants, and he knew how to create not only interest but also excitement in his wares. “Henry Heinz,” historian Nancy Koehn of the Harvard Business School has noted, “was one of the first U.S. entrepreneurs to pursue…a consistent, innovative, and multifaceted brand-building strategy.” A key part of his strategy was a revolutionary new approach to advertising. Thinking outside the box, Heinz concluded that hefty investments were essential to the long-term growth of his company. “I have contracted for more advertising matter at one time,” he wrote in July 1892, “to be used inside of a year than ever before in my life at one time, over $10K. Consisting of calendars, souvenir books, stamped out pickle cards, pickle charms and spoons, and show cards for boxes. We keep our shingle and then let the public blow our horns and that counts, but we must do something to lead them to do this.” That “something” would soon evolve from an afterthought to a fixture in corporate budgets, as executives around the globe tried to copy his formula for success (which eventually meant plowing a then astonishing 20 percent of sales back into advertising).

And his number fetish would be instrumental in helping him to create one of the most effective and enduring slogans in the history of advertising. For decades, Heinz searched for just the right phrase to describe his company. He thought about “pickle people” but nixed that one because “we were,” he later wrote, “packing many kinds of food that could not be classed as pickles.” Suddenly, in 1896, an idea came to him. While riding Manhattan’s Third Avenue El, he spotted a card advertising “21 styles of shoes.” Even though his firm was then selling about 60 different food products, his mind latched on to the number 57. In this case, as with his occasional self-deceptions about his weight, Heinz would throw precision out the window. “Seven…seven—there are so many illustrations,” he later mused, “of the psychological influence of that figure and of its alluring significance to people of all ages and races, that ‘58 Varieties’ or ‘59 Varieties’ did not appeal at all to me as being equally strong.” Jumping off the train, Heinz went straight to a lithography shop to have a new street-car card printed up. Within a week, the image of the green pickle with the “57 Varieties” was appearing in newspapers and billboards across the country. The CEO would later plaster “57” everywhere—on hillsides, on the Heinz Ocean Pier in Atlantic City, on Manhattan’s first electric sign, lit by twelve hundred incandescent bulbs, at the corner of Twenty-Third Street and Fifth Avenue, and even near the Sphinx in Cairo. (In a comic riff on the arbitrariness of this ubiquitous magic number, the McCarthyite senator in the 1962 film
The Manchurian Candidate
shakes his bottle of Heinz ketchup before announcing that there are exactly fifty-seven Communists in the State Department.) Making no distinction between brand and self, Heinz would also equate his famous formulation with his own personal identity. In 1908, after hearing that the wife of his son Howard had given birth to his grandchild Henry J. Heinz II, the founder congratulated the couple on the arrival of “the 58th variety.”

Heinz was more than just quirky; prone to paroxysms of anger and sudden mood swings, he was a mentally unstable man who lived close to the edge for most of his life. Madness ran rampant in the immediate family. His father waged a long battle with depression and died in an insane asylum; and of his seven siblings, several would be seriously impaired due to depression, anxiety, alcoholism, and various other psychiatric ills, including sexual addiction. Clarence, his eldest son, was a loner who went mad in his thirties. While Heinz’s three other children, Irene, Howard, and Clifford, got married—the playboy Clifford three times—and built families, many of their descendants have also been scarred. As the
Los Angeles Times
reported in a 2004 feature, “alcoholism, suicide, eccentric behavior and marital instability… have plagued all three wings of the family.” The society pages of mid- to late-twentieth-century newspapers are filled with stories about the crashing and burning of Heinz’s heirs. One grandson—Howard’s son Rust—perished in a car accident at the age of twenty-five, just a few months after an alcoholism counselor had described him as “not normal” and had recommended long-term psychiatric care at a residential facility for “his true textbook father complex.” And another grandson—Irene’s son John—who would die of alcoholism at fifty, was once arrested on a Manhattan street corner at 3 a.m. for beating a sixty-three-year-old stranger with a cane that contained a twenty-eight-inch dagger in its shaft.

Like Jefferson, Heinz was constantly trying to distract himself from the internal turmoil that dated back to his stressful early years. From boyhood on, this eldest child of struggling German immigrants threw himself into work and other activities, such as his counting and collecting. However, for Heinz, as opposed to Jefferson, this strategy sometimes backfired, as the constant exertion—early in his career, the entrepreneur worked seventeen-hour days—left him close to a breakdown on numerous occasions. “Am feeling feeble,” the thirty-four-year-old confided to his diary on March 23, 1879, “and often think I am going into a decline caused by overwork, excitement and extreme trouble.”

Two years later, he began to fear that he would lose his mind after his father officially lost his. On September 30, 1881, the family placed the chronically depressed seventy-year-old John Henry Heinz, a once successful brick manufacturer, in the Kirkbride Asylum for the Insane in Philadelphia. “[Father] is demented,” Heinz noted in his diary, “and hope he may be cured. It is a hard thing to have to send him away. His mind has now been disturbed four months.” (Heinz’s father would never improve.) To preserve his delicate psychic equilibrium, a terrified Heinz would repeatedly turn to professional help. Just three months later, he checked himself into New York State’s Dansville Sanitarium, which specialized in treating “chronic ailments, especially those arising from worry and over-work.” Hydrotherapy was then the treatment of choice for most psychiatric disorders, and after a brief stay, Heinz arranged for frequent electric baths at home, which he referred to as “my cure of late.”