America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation (9 page)

The trip to Europe in 1886 was part of this repeated search for relief from his psychic ills, which would go on and on and on. “Not feeling at all well,” a despondent Heinz noted in his journal on December 17, 1891, after having visited four Pittsburgh doctors, none of whom had a clue as to what exactly ailed him. The following week, on a visit to Philadelphia, he got his answer. “I consulted Dr. J. V. Schomaker on Walnut Street,” he wrote, “who diagnoses my case as overworked nerves and rheumatism in my blood.” For the last two decades of his life, Heinz would go to a German sanatorium nearly every summer for a mental tune-up, alternating between Dr. Carl von Dapper’s in Bad Kissingen and Dr. Franz Dengler’s in Baden-Baden. At these elegant Alpine retreats, where fellow patients included such high-flying aristos as Paul Romanov, a son of Russian Tsar Nicholas II, and Lord Chesterfield, the rest cure revolved around regulating the diet. At Bad Kissingen, under medical supervision, Heinz ingested a third of a pound of butter a day—it was draped on vegetables and stuffed in puddings. Though the scientific basis of these treatments turned out to be flimsy, the high-strung executive seemed to benefit; no doubt the constant weigh-ins boosted his mood at least a little. The thirty-year-old Howard, then a top executive in the family biz, reported to his father on May 2, 1907, “He [Professor von Noorden, a doctor at Bad Kissingen] said further that he had noticed quite a difference in your condition after you had omitted Dr. Dapper’s cure in 1903 and he told me when I saw him last winter to by all means persuade you to spend some time at either Dr. Dapper’s or Dr. Dengler’s this year. Whatever you do let me urge you to not come home until you have had at least four weeks at some cure.”

In insisting on this prescription, which the aging founder would dutifully obey, Howard was considering the welfare of his father as well as that of other family members, including himself. The demanding, hypercritical patriarch was not an easy man to be around. “Reading between the lines of his diary,” the hired hagiographer Eleanor Dienstag was forced to concede in her corporate history,
In Good Company: 125 Years at the Heinz Table
, “one detects a formidable temper. It suggests he [Henry] may have been a bit of a bully.” In his biography, Heinz’s secretary was more blunt: “He could and did, become stirred to great angers; and no man with one experience of these willingly incurred another.” As Howard was well aware, the longer his father spent buttering himself up on the other side of the Atlantic, the longer the family back home in Pittsburgh could relish a breather from
him
. Whatever proclivities toward mental instability various family members possessed, Heinz would exacerbate. While Howard knew how to cope with his father’s hectoring, that was not the case with his brother Clarence. “I was…surprised,” a family friend wrote Heinz about the thirty-year-old Clarence, “at his earnestness and great desire to follow your wishes whether they were to his own liking or the contrary.” In 1913, at the age of forty, Heinz’s eldest son, who had not been fully compos mentis for a few years, retreated to Wisconsin, where he got round-the-clock medical attention until his death several years later. Likewise, John Given, the husband of Heinz’s eldest child, Irene, also “was broken,” as one biographer has put it, by his verbal assaults and had to quit the family company.

According to the Reverend John Cowan, a family friend, Heinz’s spinster sister Mary, who worked as a housekeeper in his Pittsburgh mansion after his wife’s death, “enjoyed two nervous breakdowns.” As Cowan, hired by Heinz to write his biography, has reported, Mary would complain that “he [Henry] never could understand the strain upon her” of living with him. Heinz would come home unannounced, expecting a meal for himself as well as his dozen guests. After her return from Dowie’s Sanitarium in Illinois, an anxious Mary would go back to drinking hefty doses of brandy. Heinz died, however, before he could rattle Cowan, who had been worried that his persnickety employer “would probably want to change the writing and edit it [the biography] to the last comma.” Despite his protestations to the contrary—a month before his death, Heinz wrote Howard that “there never has been any
must
in my family or in the business”—the imperative mood predominated in Heinz’s communications both at home and at work. To the end, the founder would remain too self-absorbed to appreciate that his impulsive behavior could adversely affect the nervous system of anyone else.

Heinz’s decision to give up the reins of his company shortly after his fiftieth birthday would help him preserve his sanity. And as he became less consumed by the food biz, he turned to new obsessions. The compulsive traveler, who would visit both the Middle East and the Far East, developed “the relic
fever
bad,” as his son Clarence once put it. Heinz would collect curios from all over the world such as carved ivories and timepieces, which he displayed at his massive private museum. The widower, who wouldn’t remarry, loved spending hours labeling and arranging his favorite objects. By his early sixties, as the
New York Times
reported, Heinz was worth $25 million ($500 million), and though he didn’t have quite as much disposable cash as his contemporaries Henry Clay Frick and Andrew Carnegie—the three “Lords of Pittsburgh” died the same year—he still emerged as one of the city’s leading philanthropists. On his sixty-first birthday, Heinz wrote to Howard from London, announcing that he was “young at heart, enjoying better health than I did fifteen or twenty years ago, which ought to demonstrate that hard work never killed anyone.” The regular European sanatorium and American sanitarium stints—during the Great War, when he couldn’t get to Germany, he did a turn at Dr. John Kellogg’s outfit in Michigan—would continue to work their magic; and though his mind became increasingly muddled, his body would remain in tip-top shape. A decade later, on his seventy-first birthday, when asked how he felt, Heinz responded by jumping over a nearby chair. His remarkable physical vitality turned out to be partly responsible for his sudden death. On May 9, 1919, an unseasonably chilly day in Pittsburgh, Heinz noticed some workmen at his company passing bricks to one another, one at a time. Climbing the ladder that led to the scaffolding, he declared, “Here, let me show you. We used to pitch them four at a time like this.” He died of pneumonia five days later.

Though the adult Heinz would define himself by his American sensibility—“I am,” he insisted, “an American in every fiber of my body and heartbeat”—the boy grew up with two German-born parents largely unfamiliar with the American way of life.

Henry Heinz’s father, John Henry Heinz, hailed from Kallstadt, a town in the German region that is today known as Rheinland-Pfalz, where the family had administered vineyards and farms for centuries. (Kallstadt is also the ancestral home of another prominent American entrepreneur—Donald Trump—who is actually a close relative of the Pickle King. John Henry Heinz’s mother was Charlotte Luise Trump, a sister of the Donald’s great-grandfather, John Trump.) Henry Heinz’s mother, Anna Margaretha Schmidt, was born in Kruspis, located some fifty miles away in Hesse; like her husband, she was also in her twenties when she emigrated to America in the early 1840s. Both his parents settled in Birmingham, a town in southwestern Pennsylvania across the Monongahela River from Pittsburgh, where they were married in 1843. Henry, the first of the couple’s eight children, was born the following October.

In 1849, the family moved to Sharpsburg, a small rural borough in O’Hara Township, five miles north of Pittsburgh, whose population then totaled about 1,400. Acquiring a kiln, John Henry Heinz became a brick maker and contractor. In 1854, he built a two-story house on a four-acre plot on the banks of the Allegheny River. One biographer has described Heinz’s father as a “very uncomplaining sensitive soul, who would rather endure in silence than make a fuss.” Perhaps because of John Henry Heinz’s eventual decline into madness, his famous son would later say little about him. On December 23, 1891, the day his father died in the Philadelphia asylum, after noting the deranged man’s final words, “
Ich bin der Doktor. Ich bin sehr krank
” (“I am the doctor. I am very sick”), Heinz added in his diary, “He was a giant in strength and very indulgent father.”

Heinz, however, would take after his stern and enterprising mother. A devout Lutheran who repeatedly quoted chapter and verse of the Bible, she would make frequent demands on the children, from whom she would expect an immediate response. The mothering of the overbearing Anna came mostly in the form of mottos. Her favorites, which she would repeat time and time again, included “Labor sweetens life, idleness makes it a burden,” and “Remember that the bee goes to the same flower for its honey where the spider goes for its poison” (an injunction to look on the bright side; both mottos would later grace the walls of the company’s office in Pittsburgh). Forever idealizing his mother, the sixty-year-old Heinz would refer to her “Christ-like spirit.” “She could handle me,” Heinz recalled, “because she knew how to inspire me; because she knew what to say, when and how.”

Anna Heinz’s methods of persuasion included verbal and physical intimidation, a common child-rearing tool among nineteenth-century German families. While Heinz later referred to few specific early interactions with his mother, his behavior toward children offers a useful approximation of his own early experiences, as he presumably did unto others just as his mother had done unto him. In the spring of 1875, the thirty-year-old Heinz, as he acknowledged in his diary, “whipped” his fourteen-year-old brother, Jacob, for skipping school. “Would not let Irene have supper,” Heinz also noted that August of the harsh disciplinary measures taken against his four-year-old daughter, “because she pouted at table.…Yet all seemed well. Irene never let on about not having supper.” Irene’s younger brother Clarence also got roughed up as a toddler. Early in 1876, Heinz recorded the following incident, “Had to smack Clarence, but he came to me and kissed me and made up at once. Irene’s example and influence lead him.”

To ensure that he would get many more carrots than sticks from the anxious and overburdened Anna, the young “Harry” (as Henry was nicknamed) devised a clever strategy; he became his “mother’s little helper.” Feeding her large family was Anna’s constant worry, and the boy pitched in by harvesting, grating, and bottling her horseradish. By performing this painstaking chore, he spared her the bruised knuckles and watery eyes. He also worked in his mother’s neatly ordered garden. By the age of eight, Harry was peddling her surplus produce to neighbors in baskets. Two years later, Anna rewarded her favorite child by giving him his own three-quarters of an acre. At twelve, Harry was tilling three acres and transporting his fruits and vegetables in a cart drawn by his newly purchased horse, Old Baldy. In contrast, Harry’s younger brothers, John and Peter, both of whom would end up working in the family biz, would be less successful in eluding Anna Heinz’s punishments; and they would turn out very differently. Though blessed with a keen mechanical mind, John, as Harry would later complain, lacked initiative. And while Harry became a teetotaler, Peter became a chronic alcoholic, who, as one biographer has noted, “was…known for getting women pregnant out of wedlock.”

The adult Heinz would formulate “Eight Important Ideas”—he couldn’t resist numbering his personal tenets—that guided his business career. The first one ran, “Housewives are willing to pay someone else to take over a share of their more tedious kitchen work.” Harry’s addiction to making quotidian life easier for Anna Heinz would lead him to develop a whole new industry, mass-produced processed food. Thus would he also identify a new market. In the mid-nineteenth century, women preparing meals had little choice other than to slave away endlessly in the kitchen; they had few trustworthy resources outside the home to which they could turn. The condiments then sold by grocers were often laced with lead, sawdust, or even animal waste and poison, which manufacturers tried to hide by selling their wares in brown bottles. The lifelong Methodist—“Cleanliness is next to Godliness” was a tenet of the religion’s founder, the Londoner John Wesley—would establish a brand known for its purity and quality. As the Rolling Stones sang in their 1966 hit, “Mother’s Little Helper,” “Cooking fresh food for a husband’s just a drag,” and about a century before “the little yellow pills” (the barbiturate Nembutal), Heinz’s clear glass bottles would rush to the rescue of the world’s harried housewives. In 1927, company CEO Howard Heinz explained to the Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce that his father had started a “revolutionary” industry. “It was truly said,” Heinz’s son noted, “that ‘women’s work is never done.’ Now she is no longer dependent upon her own efforts to supply her household with nourishing foods.… Who can predict what woman will accomplish in her new freedom?” Thanks to Heinz’s 57-plus varieties, all women could enjoy the benefit of having an industrious little Harry by their side, and the world would never be the same.

While Anna Heinz had hoped that Harry would become a pastor, once she noticed his remarkable aptitude for business, she came around and supported his ambitious dreams. At fifteen, he dropped out of a seminary school in Sharpsburg and began working as a bookkeeper in his father’s brick company. He also continued to build his fruit and vegetable business. A year later, with several employees, including two of his younger brothers and two of his younger sisters, tending his ever-expanding garden, Harry was making three deliveries a week to Pittsburgh grocers. By seventeen, Harry was earning real money—$2,400 a year ($48,000). Like Jefferson, he also loved to keep track of the temperature, and this farmer also began experimenting with various planting techniques—say, new watering regimes—to grow his crops.

By 1865, the twenty-one-year-old Harry had saved enough to buy half of his father’s brick company. Three years later, confident in the managerial know-how of his new co-owner, John Heinz made a pilgrimage back to Germany to visit with relatives. During his father’s absence, using money from debts to the company that had been written off as uncollectible, Harry constructed a fancy new two-story brick house for his parents that contained both bow windows and an outside balcony.