California’s Hour gave air cover to broadly based community outreach efforts. Chain store managers flocked to join local chambers of commerce, service clubs, and businessmen’s associations. Increasingly generous with their donations of cash and merchandise, chain managers repaired their public image, and built new reputations as community benefactors.81
California farmers received special attention from Lord & Thomas. They comprised only about half the population of the state’s small cities and towns, but they exercised an outsized political influence. In the mid-1930s, California grocery chains sold roughly $230 million in state-grown produce. Advocates of the chain store tax were telling the farmers that the chains’ low prices were putting downward pressure on crop prices.
The chains, scripted by Lord & Thomas, retorted that they were of “incalculable value to the California farmer and manufacturer.” Their large-scale purchase agreements stabilized the market, they argued, while their efficient operations cut out waste to the benefit of producer and consumer alike. The real culprit, they argued, was in the middle layers of the distribution chain. “Lurking in the background are the REAL enemies of the people—the middlemen, who are putting up the money for this vicious campaign against the chain store.” The “discriminatory legislation” was their desperate ploy to regain their “monopolistic grip” on the state’s agricultural sector.82 Lord & Thomas recruited one of the state’s more prominent growers to serve as the spokesman for its agricultural campaign, and outfitted him with an office and staff.
Quietly, Don Francisco also opened another agricultural front. In late February 1936, the California Canning Peach Association contacted him, distressed about slumping sales. Inspired by a “farmer-consumer merchandising drive” recently orchestrated by one of the state’s leading chains, Francisco emulated that model, but on a grander scale. He cajoled leading grocery chains nationwide, with their tens of thousands of retail outlets, to push canned peaches. Soon he convinced drug and restaurant chains statewide to join in as well. The arranged marriage worked beautifully: the California cling peach growers enjoyed surging sales and generous profits, while chains across the continent pitched in against California’s chain tax movement.
As the election approached, Francisco launched similar national chain marketing campaigns for California producers of beef and dried fruits. He met with key agricultural and chain interests in New York City and Urbana, Illinois, to explore their mutual interests. The chains agreed to end several long-standing practices that had incensed the farmers—“unreasonable” quantity discounts, loss-leader retailing, unearned advertising allowances, buyer brokerage fees—and the National Co-Operative Council was born.83
Lord & Thomas was uniquely positioned to forge this alliance. Through the Sunkist and similar commodities campaigns, the agency had established deep connections throughout California’s farming establishment. It combined those connections with strong ties across the country, moving mountains of peaches, beef, and dried fruits, and changing the mechanics of retail commerce nationwide to the advantage of California’s growers.
For nine months, Don Francisco’s corps had pushed the chains to reform themselves. They had offered Californians a positive image of the chain store—as the exemplar of clean, modern, and efficient business practice; friend to the farmer and local community; creator of jobs; and steward of low prices. For the most part, the message had been positive, delivered in soft tones.84
Now, with six weeks remaining before the election, it was time to abandon the velvet touch. Lord & Thomas began to blanket the media with the memorable slogan—“22 is a Tax on You!”—and attacked the other side directly. “We exposed the tax as a scheme engineered by selfish middlemen,” recalled Francisco. “We did not hesitate to attack the professional organizers, racketeering money-raisers and self-seeking politicians who worked against us.” California’s Hour went into high gear, putting on scores of farmers, business owners, attorneys, and women to describe how their livelihoods would be damaged if the tax passed.85
Chain store employees throughout California were drafted to serve in a massive get-out-the-vote drive. “We adopted the standard technique for organizing precinct workers and applied it to chain store employees,” recalled Francisco. Each employee’s home was plotted on a map, and he or she was directed to round up neighbors and track polls.
When the votes were tallied on the night of November 3, 1936, Lord & Thomas celebrated its second stunning California political victory. The chain store tax measure was defeated by more than 300,000 votes: 1,369,778 to 1,067,443. All but one of the state’s fifty-eight counties voted against it. As soon as the outcome was clear, Francisco called Albert Lasker in Florida to share the good news with his boss.
Lasker remained on the periphery for much of the chain store tax battle. He received regular reports from the front and reassured his clients that Don Francisco’s velvet-touch strategy was not only the right one, but the only one under the circumstances.86 He took great pride in his agency’s ability to shape the course of public policy.
Subsequent events, moreover, show that he took large lessons away from the chain store experience—and lessons that might be applicable on a grand scale.
Chapter Nineteen
The Downward Spiral
IN LATE OCTOBER 1936, Flora Lasker left Chicago for an extended stay in New York City. Albert went off for a three-week fishing trip in Florida, planning to join his wife in New York in time for a speech he was scheduled to deliver to the American Association of Advertising Agents on November 19.1
Flora was then in her late fifties, and had been an invalid, coping with varying degrees of disability, for three decades. Stout and sallow, she walked with difficulty. Visits to the mineral baths at Watkins Glen, New York, during the summer afforded her some respite and also gave her the chance to visit her family in Buffalo.2 But she suffered from chronic headaches, often intense enough to send her to bed. In recent years, her son Edward later recalled, she had become obsessed with her own mortality: “She talked constantly about dying . . . If she ever got annoyed about Father, the conversation would never end without her saying, ‘Some day you will find me in bed after one of these headaches, and you will find me dead, and then you will realize.’”3
There were times when Albert was clearly impatient with his slow-moving wife, and other times when he paid very little attention to her. Because of her physical challenges, and perhaps because she felt outshone, she didn’t enjoy socializing as much as her husband. “She was dull, compared to him,” David Sarnoff observed.4
Flora—like so many others—found her husband a challenge. Albert was exhausting, demanding, and difficult—and also endlessly interesting and energizing. Ralph Sollitt, who knew the family as well as any outsider, spoke to the contrasts between Albert and Flora, and the tensions that resulted:
He was aggressive and hard-headed, wanted his house to be 42nd Street and 5th Avenue all the time, from nine o’clock in the morning until midnight, and Mrs. Lasker would have been very delighted to have seen her husband every day and perhaps one other person perhaps every six months . . . She was borne along a little unwillingly on all this Hip Hooray and excitement.
The last years of her life she got to be better physically than she [had been], and I felt that . . . she came to have a tolerance for the exuberance that she felt was quite unnecessary. He had all these animal spirits all the time, and she thought it would be so much better for him and everybody else if he could tone himself down. [But] I had a feeling in the last seven or eight years that she came to see that maybe Albert Lasker wouldn’t be nearly so interesting to her, if he didn’t have all that.5
Lasker’s eye may have wandered during the course of his marriage. Edward wrote in his own unpublished memoir that while his father had assured him that he had never been unfaithful to Flora, “I do not take his words too seriously.”6 But through it all, Flora exerted a profound influence over Albert. She was his central point of reference�
�a stabilizing force. Introspective, conservative, and even from her limited vantage point an acute observer of the world, she provided a strong counterpoint to her husband’s own life narrative. “He couldn’t get disconnected from her,” Sarnoff said. “He had to have an anchor.”
On their last night together in Chicago, at the Burton Place mansion, Albert and Flora shared a tender moment. Over the previous several months, Flora had lost a considerable amount of weight, and Albert was proud of her accomplishment. She remained a near-invalid, however; she couldn’t walk up a flight of stairs without exhausting herself. Couches had been strategically located on the stair landings so that she could rest and catch her breath, and it was on one of those couches, with Albert attending her, that she made an unusual observation: “You know, we have reached the loveliest time of our married life. All the early, hectic, romantic love is over, and in its place has come a deep and abiding friendship. We love each other not only for our virtues, [but also for] our faults, and we won’t change a single virtue or surrender a single fault because then it would be something else.”7
The Laskers maintained a suite of rooms at the Ritz for their frequent visits to New York. As soon as Flora arrived for her stay in the fall of 1936, friends and members of the extended family began visiting with her. Edward, then living in Greenwich, Connecticut, and working in Lord & Thomas’s New York office, stopped by after work; Albert stayed there when he arrived from Florida. Daughter Mary lived in Chicago, but Francie was at nearby Vassar College and made plans to travel down to New York on December 19 to join her family.
On the evening of December 17—a Thursday night—Flora, Albert, and Edward sat talking quietly at the Ritz. Flora was in her element. “Nothing made her as happy,” Edward later commented, “as to be alone with the members of her family, and talking about each other.” The conversation meandered, eventually settling on the subject of Albert. “You can’t convince me,” Flora said at one point, “that you’re not the most wonderful man in the world.” Albert, embarrassed, told her that she shouldn’t say things like that in front of other people—even their own son. After Edward left for the evening, Albert returned to the subject. She shouldn’t embarrass him with such grand and sweeping compliments, he insisted.
But Flora held her ground: “I know all your failings, your weaknesses. You are insufferably egotistical on the things you know nothing about, and you are painfully modest about those things about which you know everything.” She told her husband that she loved him more than anything or anyone in the world—even more than her children. “You’re a wicked woman,” a startled Albert replied. “I know,” Flora persisted. “I love you more.”
The next day was a busy one for Albert, since for the first time, all Lord & Thomas employees making less than $5,000 a year received a surprise Christmas bonus of a half-month’s salary. The agency had experimented briefly with bonuses in the 1920s; now—perhaps influenced by the California chain store campaign’s successful conclusion a month earlier, which focused in part on creating satisfied employees—Lasker decided to revive the tradition. Most likely the bonus was a topic of discussion at the Ritz that night, as Flora and Albert’s suite filled up with guests for an impromptu Friday night soirée. But Flora wasn’t feeling well, and she soon excused herself.
On Saturday, Francie arrived, which gave Flora new cause to celebrate. It was to be their last day in New York; tomorrow, the family would decamp for Chicago. (There a surprise awaited Flora: a new $16,000 Lincoln that Albert had had specially modified for her.) But by midday, Flora was complaining of pain in her arms and sweating profusely. “You know,” she told Edward, “it is the same way that Blanche Mandel felt just before she died.” Edward, annoyed, assured his mother that she wasn’t dying. They talked quietly in her bedroom as Albert and Pittsburgh newspaper magnate Paul Block—an old family friend—conversed in the adjoining sitting room. When Block eventually rose to leave, Edward offered to accompany him to the elevator. Some fifty feet down the hallway, he suddenly heard his father crying out his name. He rushed back to the suite and into his mother’s bedroom: “Mother was lying there, breathing in a very loud and unnatural way, and I was sure what had happened to her—that she had a stroke—and the maid was being hysterical, and Father was being hysterical, too, saying, ‘Do something! Do something!’”
By the time a doctor could be located, Flora was dead of a cerebral thrombosis. The thirty-four-year partnership between Albert and Flora Lasker was over.
According to his biographer, Albert was rendered “completely distraught” by Flora’s death. Recuperating with his daughter Mary and son-in-law Gerald Foreman at the Miami Beach estate, he kept Mary awake all night with professions of his undying love for Flora. He obsessed about his shortcomings, as loss and guilt became inextricably bound up in his mind.
Slowly, in the early months of 1937, Albert began patching his life back together. He played poker with the Partridges at Burton Place. He threw elaborate parties at Mill Road Farm, including a June 1937 dinner for 107 guests. Honors came his way: lunch at the White House, membership on the University of Chicago’s board of trustees, and others. These distractions were necessary, but insufficient.
Flora left an estate of just over $2.3 million, which after taxes amounted to some $1.4 million. Albert received about half of that amount, with Edward, Mary, and Francie each getting just over $200,000, and the remaining $95,000 going to other family members.8 The estate was settled almost exactly a year to the day after Flora’s death—a coincidence that certainly didn’t escape Albert’s attention, even though when that unhappy anniversary arrived, he was on the other side of the world.
In the summer of 1937, Albert Lasker took an uncharacteristic step. Finally acceding to a request that Flora had made many times over the years, and ignoring the objections of at least one of his children, he decided to produce an autobiography.9
Lasker chose not to write the book himself. His work and family obligations would have made that difficult; his unsettled emotional state also would have interfered. Hiring a ghostwriter, as so many business moguls before him had done, was the natural solution. He settled upon a journeyman writer named Boyden Sparkes, who had been a war correspondent for the New York Tribune, had written books for or about several “business celebrities,” and had close ties to the editors at the Saturday Evening Post, for which he had written inspirational first-person accounts such as White Sox star Eddie Collins’s “From Player to Pilot.”10 Walter Chrysler’s autobiography, as told to Boyden Sparkes, was serialized in the Post in the summer of 1937 and helped bring Sparkes to Lasker’s attention.
Lasker and Sparkes settled on a fee of $30,000. But perhaps owing to his distracted state of mind, Lasker failed to define an audience for the project. “I want this book for a circulation of three,” Lasker told Sparkes at an early meeting. “Three children, each a copy. That means more to me than all the other circulating, and it is the only purpose of the book.”11 At other points in their conversations, however, Lasker said that the purpose of the book was “to show how to sell,” or to explain to readers what kills great companies (their goods becoming commodities, or their owners getting greedy and trying to grow too fast), or to underscore the perils of governmental bureaucracy.
The most grandiose of these schemes held the most appeal for the ambitious Sparkes, who—in addition to getting mixed messages from Lasker—also engaged in some selective hearing. Lasker had been thinking out loud about a sweeping plan to remake the American economy, and it was those visions, rather than a “circulation of three,” that Sparkes latched on to.
The project officially began on September 14, 1937, when Sparkes traveled with Lasker aboard the Union Pacific’s Forty-Niner, a streamliner that ran five times a month from Chicago to San Francisco. Sparkes brought along a stenographer to record the conversations. It must have been a striking scene: Lasker striding around the plush railroad car for hours at a time, gesturing animatedly, punctuating his sentences wit
h his characteristic rapid-fire interjections—You see? Do you see? D’you see? Do I make myself clear?—while Sparkes tried to extract from the fire-hose flow of Lasker’s hyperactive brain the building blocks of a coherent story. In the corner, a harried stenographer struggled to keep up.
Lasker enjoyed the process. When the Forty-Niner reached San Francisco, he invited Sparkes and the stenographer to continue on with him to Honolulu aboard the S.S. Lurline. What Sparkes extracted from his subject during those two weeks was a sprawling jumble of anecdotes, insight, emotion, exaggeration, tantalizing leads, red herrings, and dead-ends. “My father [alone] is going to take all morning,” Lasker enthused in their opening session aboard the Forty-Niner. Then his mind raced off to the Leo Frank case, then to a movie (They Won’t Forget) that he had just seen, and then to his own policy against self-promotion:
All my life long I felt it was a mistake, I have made up my mind to be in the background of other things, while I was making people and things known. And there is a great reason for that: You can have much more power to make people and things known if you are unknown yourself . . . If you are going to work, and willing to think, and you are nobody, a lot of people will let you do a lot of things they won’t if they think you are somebody. Do I make myself clear?12
The Man Who Sold America: The Amazing (but True!) Story of Albert D. Lasker and the Creation of the Advertising Century Page 40