This was the highly structured life that Lasker, in his July 1938 announcement, now proposed to give up.
He named the forty-six-year-old Don Francisco, spearhead of the California campaigns, as his successor, and also promoted David Noyes and Sheldon Coons to the posts of executive vice president. According to Time, the scuttlebutt within the industry was that Lasker had grown “more interested in cruises than in clients,” and had long planned to quit the agency.23 For his part, Lasker informed his clients that he had always intended to “withdraw from active service” as president of Lord & Thomas when he completed his fortieth year of service with the agency—a milestone that he had reached on May 31. “I shall retain financial interest in Lord & Thomas,” he said, “and shall contribute to the agency’s policies as may be required.”24
This decision was soon reversed. Francisco did not thrive in his new job, in large part because Lasker never really left the stage. In October 1940, Francisco took a leave of absence from Lord & Thomas to work in Washington with Nelson A. Rockefeller on relations between the United States and Latin American countries; the leave turned out to be permanent.
That fall, Lasker—still grieving over the loss of Flora and afflicted by the ever-present specter of depression—left Chicago for what he thought would be an extended recuperation in California. (Just before departing, he made another precipitous and perhaps symbolic decision: selling off the herd of prize-winning Guernsey cattle at Mill Road Farm.) By that point, his friend and long-ago political mentor, Will Hays, had been serving as the moral policeman of Hollywood for a dozen years. Hays, convinced that what the grieving and disoriented Lasker needed was a new wife, arranged a series of dinners with eligible Hollywood starlets.
At one of those dinners, probably in September, Lasker re-encountered Doris Kenyon, an accomplished actor and singer who had achieved national celebrity during the silent-film era—signing a movie contract in 1916 while still a teenager for an astounding $50,000 per year, and starring in one of Paramount’s first all-talking pictures (Interference, 1929)—but whose acting career had been trailing off for a decade.25 Over the course of that career, she had run afoul of censors both in New York and Hollywood, owing in equal parts to her assertive personality and her smoldering screen persona.26 One of those censors was Will Hays—who in 1931 had objected strongly to a Warner Bros. film, The Road to Singapore, which starred Kenyon and William Powell as a pair of hot-blooded and unrepentant adulterers—but Hays and Kenyon nevertheless became friends.27
Kenyon divorced her second husband in 1933, and was evidently open to finding a new partner. Then forty years old, she was still striking, with wide-set eyes, a broad and ready smile, and wavy blond hair. Lasker had met her briefly in California the previous fall, just before embarking on his world tour. On this second encounter, the ad man and the actress became infatuated with each other, and decided to marry immediately.
The couple signed a prenuptial agreement on October 14, 1938. Lasker’s net worth was then in excess of $10 million—mainly in the form of securities and his Florida and Illinois properties—whereas Kenyon (who had an eleven-year-old son from her first marriage) had almost no assets. The agreement stipulated that if Kenyon was still living with Lasker as his wife when he died, she would be entitled to a lump-sum payment of $200,000 and could keep any properties that they acquired together. In the case of a divorce or separation, the prenuptial agreement would become null and void.28
The wedding was scheduled to take place in Lasker’s apartment at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on October 28. Francie Lasker agreed to stay with Kenyon during the two days of festivities. She remembered Kenyon as naive but charming—“a lovely woman”—and recalled that October interlude as a jarring combination of drama and farce:
The whole thing was really heartbreaking. It was too ridiculous. I mean, he was a man in his fifties. Father had this dinner with 50 people two nights before he was married. I remember looking at everybody. I was in the middle of the table, and he was at the end of it. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
It was so strange. The night before he was married, he had a bachelor’s dinner. Doris and I were having dinner in the rooms, and she turned to me and said, “Frances, is your father always like this?”
Oh, my god! That’s no marriage, right?29
After exchanging vows—and after Lasker gave his new bride a magnificent sable coat as a wedding gift—the couple set sail on the Île de France for a honeymoon in England.30 Almost immediately, it became clear that the marriage had been a terrible mistake. Lasker found that in the company of a movie star, he was no longer the center of attention. He badgered and bullied her in small ways, insisting—for example—that she eat foods that she disliked.31 He experienced problems with impotence, no doubt a devastating blow to a man whose new wife had been, for millions, the embodiment of sex appeal.32 Well before the monthlong honeymoon was over, the union had collapsed. Lasker sent an urgent cable to his son-in-law, Gerhard Foreman, begging for help in dissolving the marriage. Upon the Laskers’ return to the United States on December 1, they immediately split up. Lasker moved in with Gerhard and Mary at their North State Street home in Chicago; he lived there for several months, his emotional health in peril.
Kenyon behaved admirably throughout the humiliating episode. Although Lasker paid her $375,000 as a full settlement on December 21, 1938—very generous, in light of the terms of their prenuptial agreement—no public word of the couple’s troubles leaked out until the following year. On February 6, a distraught Lasker, unraveling quickly, checked himself into the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.33 Two weeks later, Kenyon admitted to reporters that she and Lasker had split. “Mr. Lasker and I found our hasty marriage incompatible,” she said. “We have decided to end it, and thus maintain our valued friendship, for we hold only the highest regard for each other.”34
In June, Kenyon traveled to Reno, where the divorce was finalized on June 8, 1939.35 By that time, Lasker was already obsessed with the woman who would become his third wife, and he tried hard—and successfully—to erase the painful memory of this disastrous marital interlude. Some years later, Lasker saw an attractive woman in a theater. “I know that pretty woman,” he said to his new wife. “I know her. What’s her name? Who is she?”
That pretty woman was Doris Kenyon.36
Concurrent with the disastrous Kenyon affair was Lasker’s involvement in a series of legal proceedings, collectively known as the “Manton case,” which also caused Lasker much misery.
The case grew out of a $250,000 loan that he had made in 1932 at the request of his friend Paul H. Hahn, legal adviser and vice president of the American Tobacco Company, and an assistant to George Washington Hill.37 Lasker believed that the loan was intended to cover stock losses suffered by executives at American Tobacco, perhaps even Hill himself. He had good reason for thinking so: a year earlier, he had loaned $150,000 to Louis Levy—another of his friends, and a partner in the New York law firm of Stanchfield & Levy, which represented American Tobacco—for this same purpose.38
Lasker made the loan personally, rather than through the business, although his decision certainly was influenced by the fact that American Tobacco was then a $19 million Lord & Thomas account, with commissions running around $2.8 million a year. Ralph Sollitt signed the check for Lasker and delivered it—in May 1932—to a shady intermediary named James J. Sullivan.39 This time, though, the funds never reached American Tobacco executives. Instead, they were funneled into several firms controlled by U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals judge Martin T. Manton.
Manton, senior judge on the three-judge court in New York City, had no qualms about engaging in business as a sitting judge; in fact, he owned or controlled a dozen corporations and used his judicial position to benefit those companies. (Manton’s abuse of his position was well known in the underworld, and had earned him the nickname of “Preying Manton.”) Sullivan was one of his many partners. A month after receiving Lasker’s
money, however indirectly, Manton provided the tie-breaking vote on a verdict in favor of American Tobacco in a $10 million stockholder lawsuit.40
Lasker soon realized that the loan had the potential to be embarrassing to him, and he tried for several years to collect from Sullivan, who died in 1935.41 Another three years passed, at which point the headline-hungry New York district attorney, Thomas Dewey, began investigating Manton’s affairs. In September 1938, that investigation led Dewey’s staff to Albert Lasker, who told them everything he knew about the loan.
On January 30, 1939, on the front page of the New York Times, Dewey accused Manton of accepting bribes from at least six litigants in return for favorable verdicts. Lasker’s role in the drama appeared on page 3—mortifying publicity for a man who rarely sought it.42
Manton resigned from the federal bench and was indicted by a federal grand jury in April. At his trial in May, the prosecution called Lasker as a witness. Because the statute of limitations on the incidents involving Lasker had expired, the case against Manton did not include any criminal charges pertaining to the Lasker loan. But the details of that loan were introduced as evidence, and Lasker was called upon to explain himself.
Lasker believed that his good name was at stake. He was closely connected to several of the principals in the case, and his money had lined the pockets of a corrupt federal judge. He became increasingly agitated, convinced that the case would ruin him.
Those worries turned out to be misplaced. The evidence showed unequivocally that he had known nothing about the scheme. In fact, as his testimony and that of others amply demonstrated, Lasker was a victim, rather than a perpetrator. Manton was convicted on corruption charges, and spent seventeen months in federal prison.43
While Lasker’s friends Hahn and Levy faced no criminal charges, disbarment proceedings were initiated against both men in the summer of 1939. Late that summer, Lasker returned to court to testify against them. Again, he proved a strong witness, with the judge in the case noting that Lasker had been “shamefully treated” by his friends. United States Attorney John Cahill even extended compliments to Lasker: “The only person whose conduct is consistent with his testimony of what took place is Albert D. Lasker of the firm of Lord & Thomas, who, it seems to us, has been grossly misused in the situation, and in fairness to them I think it should publicly be said that we find absolutely no ground for criticism of the conduct of Lord & Thomas.”44
Levy—who was deeply involved in Manton’s many schemes—was disbarred.45 Hahn, although scolded by the presiding judge for his poor judgment, was exonerated, and later became president of American Tobacco. To Lasker, these were secondary concerns; what mattered to him was his own good name. “A. D. Lasker wholly blameless,” read the welcome subhead on the front page of the Times.46
During this bizarre interlude in Albert Lasker’s life—rife with both private and public turmoil—Boyden Sparkes continued to labor away on the autobiography. He conducted interviews with people who had known Lasker at all stages of his life, ranging from family members and high school friends to potentates at the highest reaches of corporate America. When possible, he met on a monthly basis with Lasker. By March 1938, he had generated 378 pages of personal interviews with Lasker and 761 pages of interviews with others.
By this time, too, he probably had inklings that the project was in trouble. It had taken Sparkes only a week to do the background interviews in and around Detroit for his Alfred Sloan biography; now, given the turmoil in Lasker’s professional and personal lives, this new book threatened to drag on indefinitely.
In March 1939, shortly after checking out of the Mayo Clinic, a beleaguered Lasker stunned Sparkes by telling him that throughout all of their interviews to date, he had been “a man practically in a state of amnesia,” and couldn’t be held responsible for his words. As Sparkes noted in a memo to himself:
What does this mean? If I accept his statement—and he said it so many times as to leave me no choice—it means that none of the material he gave me previously can be regarded as valid. It means that I have to start from the beginning.
Now, I expect to rewrite where I have failed to capture the spirit of a story or for some other failure of my own, but I can’t be held accountable for such a thing as this. A study of my conversations with Mr. Lasker shows many other conflicts, conflicts in instructions. I have no desire to take the slightest advantage of him. I do believe that if he had not burdened me with so many instructions, I would have been through with his story, that it would have been published in the Saturday Evening Post months before several embarrassing circumstances had arisen to plague this undertaking.47
Lasker continued to offer Sparkes intermittent encouragement—as in the spring of 1940, when he wrote that he hoped the manuscript that Sparkes had started writing “after the first of the year is nearing, or has reached completion.”48 But, conflicted, he also sabotaged Sparkes’s efforts to get the story serialized in the Post.
The project stalled. Client and author had reached an impasse over money, scope, and distribution of the work, but that wasn’t the real problem. Lasker had moved on to new realms, with a new partner. For Lasker, then at the end of one phase of his life and the beginning of another, looking back simply proved too painful.
Chapter Twenty
Changing a Life
ALBERT LASKER’S failed marriage to Doris Kenyon might have seemed ample reason to avoid yet another intense personal relationship. But Lasker believed that he needed the stability of married life—an anchor to keep him from drifting into dangerous waters—and so he once again set out to find the right match. He would discover the right woman, he told a friend, even if it meant marrying ten times over.1
When the right woman did come along, Lasker almost failed to notice her. On the afternoon of April 1, 1939, Lasker was taking a long lunch with William Donovan—lawyer, former New York gubernatorial candidate, and future “father” of the Central Intelligence Agency—at New York’s storied Twenty-One. Donovan introduced him to a friend, Mary Woodard Reinhardt, who was seated at a nearby table. Although the thirty-eight-year-old Reinhardt was a striking woman—with piercing eyes set deeply into a wide face, a dramatic head of wavy brown hair, and a broad grin—Lasker acknowledged the introduction with little more than a vague smile. A few minutes later, he passed Mary’s table on his way to use the telephone without giving her a glance.
Mary thought to herself, “That man is making a great mistake not to pay any attention to me.”2
After lunch, still in the restaurant, Lasker got another chance: he and Mary were introduced a second time by their mutual friend Lewis Strauss. Minutes later, they were introduced a third time by art collector Max Epstein. This time, finally, something clicked. After Mary left, Lasker began quizzing Donovan about this elegant woman who seemed to know everyone who mattered. He was intrigued to learn, among other things, that Mary was divorced, much admired in the right circles, and an entrepreneur and businesswoman of no small reputation.
Mary got a phone call the following afternoon from Mrs. Bernard Gimbel, who was hosting Lasker the following weekend at her country house and was anxious to have Mary join them. The next day, she got another phone call, this time from Max Epstein, inviting her for cocktails at 5:00 the next day. Mary, preoccupied with her mother’s health, missed some of the details, but agreed to stop by.
The following day, she arrived at Epstein’s residence at 6:00, assuming that she was fashionably late for a cocktail party. To her surprise, she found only her host—and an irate Albert Lasker, aggrieved at being kept waiting for a full hour! Mary, amused, managed to calm Lasker down. As the two talked, she was surprised by his informed opinions on many of her favorite subjects. When she mentioned her love of flowers, he airily observed that he had the best garden border in the country. When she raised the subject of boats and sailing, he offered to take her on a cruise of Lake Michigan on his yacht. “I was impressed with anyone who was so downright about what he knew and wh
at he did and what he had, and factual and entertaining at the same time,” Mary recalled. “He had an extraordinary quality of vitality, and this business of being amusing at the same time. He was so down to earth that it was almost funny, and he often said very funny things.”3
Albert and Mary met again at the Gimbels’ for lunch on the following Sunday, where they took a long walk before lunch and talked of more serious topics, including the prospect of global war, then weighing heavily on Albert’s mind. Mary decided that Lasker was the most brilliant man that she had ever met. But there was a cloud over that brilliance. “He was very agitated and nervous,” Mary later recalled, “and I realized that he was terribly distressed, but he was at the same time extremely interesting and entertaining.”4
Mary and Albert got together several more times that spring—once for dinner on May 1 (Lasker’s birthday), after Lasker returned from a visit to Mill Road Farm, and again at a party on June 21, the day that the Manton verdict was brought in. That party was thrown by Mary and her close friend Kay Swift, the Broadway composer, on the terrace of Mary’s penthouse apartment on East 52nd Street—a soirée that brought together many of Mary’s closest friends, including Margaret Sanger, the head of the Birth Control Federation of America; Lasker’s friend David Sarnoff; and famed analysts Karl and William Menninger. Also in attendance was utility executive and prominent New Deal foe Wendell Willkie, whom Mary thought would be a good candidate to run against Franklin Roosevelt in the upcoming presidential election. (Albert told Mary that this was the craziest idea he had ever heard; within the year, he would be helping Willkie secure the Republican nomination.)
The Man Who Sold America: The Amazing (but True!) Story of Albert D. Lasker and the Creation of the Advertising Century Page 42