Shades of Fortune

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  There was a collective gasp, followed by a stunned silence, throughout the room.

  “Of course, it is possible that, as we continue our searches, more funds will turn up. But, thus far, we have found nothing.”

  “What about the hundred million?” Edwee shouted. “He used to say that he had a hundred million dollars’ worth of the best gilt-edged securities in the world!”

  “Upon examining the contents of four separate safe-deposit boxes that we know he kept, we have found certificates for stock in many different companies, but most of these, I’m afraid, went out of business a number of years ago. For instance, he owned ten thousand shares of something called the Pittsburgh Municipal Streetcar Company. Pittsburgh Municipal declared bankruptcy and went out of business in 1933. I’ve prepared a full list of the securities he owned but, I’m afraid—”

  “Worthless!” Nonie sobbed.

  “At some point in time, these securities may have represented an investment of a hundred million dollars, or thereabouts, on his part. But, today, I’m afraid—”

  “Worthless! Worthless pieces of paper!”

  “Yes, I’m afraid so. Yes.” He paused again. “Meanwhile, there are, of course, other assets in the estate. There is the Miray manufacturing plant in Secaucus. There are the two distribution warehouses in East St. Louis and in Burbank, California. And there is the value of the inventory presently stored in these warehouses, and the products in Secaucus that are ready for sale. All this—equipment, supplies, office furnishings—will be taken into account when we compute the book value of the shares of Miray stock each of you now owns. That will take some time. Meanwhile, unfortunately—”

  “Unfortunately what?”

  “Unfortunately, against these assets there are some rather heavy liabilities. During the last twenty or twenty-five years of his life, it seems, your father borrowed rather liberally—too liberally, it would now seem—from various banks, brokerage houses, insurance companies, and other financial institutions. These outstanding debts, unfortunately—”

  “How much?” It was Edwee again.

  “Right now, we are talking about a figure between eighty and ninety million dollars.”

  There was another collective groan around the room.

  “And, of course, there is no guarantee that other debts won’t surface as we move forward in time. No, unfortunately, no guarantee. We are talking only of the state of affairs at this particular point in time.”

  There was silence now, and none of the members of the family seemed able to look at any of the others.

  It was Henry Myerson who broke the silence. “This whole thing is inconceivable to me,” he said. “How in God’s name did this happen, George?”

  “Straighten your necktie, Henry dear,” Granny Flo suggested.

  “I was never privy to your father’s business decisions, Henry,” George Wardell said. “I only served as your father’s legal counsel. My specialty, as you know, is trademark law.”

  “Your necktie, Henny-Penny,” Granny Flo said, tapping her collarbone. “It’s all twisted and funny.”

  “Tell me something,” Henry continued. “How much of this Miray stock we’ve just inherited is being used to collateralize these loans of his?”

  “That’s another thing,” Wardell said. “Another most unfortunate thing. Quite a lot of it has been used that way. Most of it, it seems.”

  “So the banks own us.”

  “My God!” Nonie screamed. “First you tell me that I got only five percent, and then you tell me it’s five percent of nothing!”

  “Now listen, Nonie,” Henry said. “There are more important things to discuss here than who got what. We’ve got a company to run. We’ve got a payroll to meet, for one thing.”

  “Yes,” George Wardell said. “There is a payroll to be met on the fifteenth of this month, which I don’t need to remind you is only six days away. One hundred and fourteen thousand dollars will be needed for that. Yes, Henry, I agree that meeting this payroll must be one of your very first concerns.”

  “How would he have met it if he had lived, I wonder?”

  “That, Henry, I do not know. It’s one of the questions I’ve been asking myself as I’ve been going over the estate. Your father was a very shrewd businessman, but also a very secretive one. He carried his entire business, as they say, around with him in his head.” George Wardell chuckled softly, as though he had made a little joke, but there was little mirth in the chuckle.

  “Those loans will have to be extended—somehow,” Henry said. “Also,” he said, looking around the room at the others, “all of us are going to have to make some deep personal sacrifices.”

  “Don’t talk to me about sacrifices!” Nonie said. “I have nothing to sacrifice! I’m penniless. I’m a pauper, now.”

  “Listen to me, all of you,” Henry said, sitting forward in his chair. “If I’m going to run this company, I’m going to need sacrifices from all of you—personal sacrifices, or there’s going to be no Miray Corporation left to run, and nothing left for any of us. I’m talking about personal funds—stock portfolios, savings accounts. I’m going to need your help. Are you all behind me, or are you not?”

  “We’re behind you, Daddy,” Mimi said.

  “Well, I’m not!” Nonie said. “Count me out!”

  “Nonie, this is a crisis,” he said. “Don’t you understand? It seems to me you’ve always lived pretty well. Think you could do without your butler, Nonie? Think you could do without your personal maid? Without your private secretary? Without getting your hair done every day?”

  “You’re asking me to give up my private secretary?”

  “You’re talking like a damned fool, Nonie,” her mother said.

  “As for the widow,” George Wardell said, “Mrs. Myerson has inherited, outright, three important pieces of property—outright and, fortunately, unentailed. There is the house on Madison Avenue, the house in Bar Harbor, the house in Palm Beach—plus, of course, the yacht. These pieces are of not inconsiderable value, and there is also the value of their contents—antiques, Oriental rugs, the art collection, jewels, and so on.”

  Granny Flo, who had been working on her needlepoint throughout most of this, suddenly put down her stitchery and looked up. “My Guggenheim trusts,” she said sharply. “Where are they?”

  “Subsumed, I’m afraid. Dis—”

  “I had a trust from my father and grandfather, and from each of my uncles!”

  “I realize that. But, you see, Mrs. Myerson, you gave your husband your full power of attorney in 1936. The following year, he appointed himself your sole trustee. The funds in those trusts appear to have been dissipated, I’m sorry to say.”

  “Dissipated! Stolen, you mean! Robbed blind! I might have known it! All those pieces of paper he was always getting me to sign!”

  “Most unfortunate, yes.”

  Granny Flo slapped her needlepoint canvas with the back of her hand. “So. I’m left with three big houses, and no money to run them on.”

  “That would seem—”

  “Where did it go? What did he spend it all on?”

  “On maintaining, it would seem, your somewhat opulent lifestyle.”

  “Opulent,” she snorted. “Well, I’m fed up with opulence. I’ve had it with opulence up to here,” and with her index finger she drew an imaginary line just beneath her chin. “With opulence and a quarter, you can get a free ride on the bus! So that’s where it all went—on opulence. All through the Depression, when everyone else was tightening their belts, nobody could understand how we were able to live the way we did. The Magnificent Myersons! Ha! The Magnificent Mr. Myerson was just raiding his wife’s trusts. Well, I’ll tell you what I want to do, George. I want to unload all that stuff. Right now. All of it. Unload Madison Avenue; I never liked that house, anyway. Unload Bar Harbor. I hate Bar Harbor—those snobs. They came to our parties but never invited us back. Unload Palm Beach; I hate Palm Beach even more than Bar Harbor, if that’s poss
ible. Down there, they wouldn’t even let us inside the Everglades Club because we were ‘of Hebraic extraction.’ Unload the damn yacht. I tossed my cookies every time we went out on it. Unload everything. All I need is a little apartment, big enough for Itty-Bitty and me. I’ll tell you what I want you to do, George. There’s this hot-shot young real-estate man in town—Michael Something. Mimi knows him.”

  “Horowitz,” Mimi said.

  “That’s him! Michael Horowitz. They say he could sell umbrellas in the Gobi Desert. Call him. Tell him I want to unload everything, as fast as I can, and for as much money as I can get. Tell him Miray has a payroll to meet in six days, so there’s no time to waste. Got that? Get this Michael Horowitz for me.” She stood up abruptly to her full stature, which, for Fleurette Myerson, was not very tall. “I don’t know about any of the rest of you,” she said, “but I’m going home now. I’m going home and start putting price tags on everything. Good-bye.” She gathered up her needlework and marched toward the office door, opened it, and closed it with a slam behind her.

  After her departure, George Wardell replaced his spectacles on his nose and looked about at the others. “I’m afraid this hasn’t been a very happy meeting for any of us,” he said quietly. “All this, coming on top of your natural bereavement—”

  “Bereavement!” Nonie said. “I’m glad he’s dead. Now we all know what a bastard he was.”

  “Well,” Brad said to Mimi as they sat having a drink, “at least we still have each other.” They had crossed the street to the Biltmore’s Under-the-Clock bar after leaving the lawyer’s office, and a string quartet was playing “Zegeuner.” “I may not have married an heiress, but I married the prettiest, smartest girl in New York, who makes me very happy.” He touched his cocktail glass to hers. “I’m doing all right downtown. Next year, I expect to be made a partner—old Walrus Waldenmeier has hinted at it. I’m happy, I’m in love, we’re together. We’ll survive.”

  “I felt sorriest for Aunt Nonie. She’s always been a frustrated tycoon. Or tycooness. Is there such a thing as a tycooness?”

  “I felt sorrier for your father, taking over a company that’s eighty-plus million dollars in the hole.”

  “Don’t worry about Daddy. Now that he’s finally been given his head, I think he’ll show strengths that will surprise you. He’ll pull the company out of this. You’ll see.”

  “This reminds me of one of my uncles,” he said. “One of my Bradford uncles in Boston, Uncle Reggie. Everybody assumed that Uncle Reggie was pretty rich. Since he and Aunt Abby had no children, everybody sort of hoped, you know, that when Uncle Reggie died, each of us would get a little something. Well, when Uncle Reggie died, there was nothing. Nothing. What had he been living on? On air, it seemed, and credit. He owed everybody in town. Aunt Abby kept insisting that he must have had a lot of money hidden away somewhere. She became convinced that he must have had the money pasted under the wallpaper of his house, so she had all the wallpaper stripped throughout the house. They stripped off layer after layer of wallpaper, looking for a layer of thousand-dollar bills. Of course they never found anything. They ended up with nothing but a paperhanger’s bill.”

  “Fourteen thousand, three hundred and eighty-seven dollars and twenty-six cents. That’s all Grandpa was worth. How much will old Wardell’s bill be for all of this, would you imagine?”

  With a finger, he scooped the olive out of his martini glass and popped it into his mouth. He scratched his head. “Well, speaking as a member of the legal profession,” he said, “my guess would be that Wardell’s bill will be roughly fourteen thousand, three hundred and eighty-seven dollars and twenty-six cents.”

  She laughed. “Dear Brad,” she said, “that’s what I love about you. You can make me laugh. Even in the face of disaster, you can make me laugh.”

  “I had to hand it to your Granny Flo. I think she plans to help the company out in any way she can. That thing she said about Miray having a payroll to meet. You say you know this Michael Horowitz character?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Is he the right person to handle her property, do you think?”

  “Yes,” Mimi said. “He probably is.”

  21

  “My father did a very brave thing,” Mimi is saying. “In retrospect, given hindsight, it may not have been the wisest thing to do, but, at the time, something had to be done, and what he did took courage. He acted decisively, and he acted fast. I was terribly proud of him at the time.

  “If you talk to others in the industry, you’ll hear them say that Henry Myerson took a deeply troubled company and drove it virtually into bankruptcy. But that’s not a fair appraisal of what really happened.

  “To begin with, you have to understand that this is a business where newness is everything. You’ve got to keep introducing new things—new nail and lip shades, new creams, new fragrances. This year’s new nail shade may not be all that different from last year’s, but at least it has a new name, and looks a little different, and seems new. My grandfather understood this, and the Revsons understood it—they learned it from Grandpa. The Lauders are just now beginning to understand the importance of newness. I mean, Estée came out with something called Youth-Dew twenty-five years ago—a perfectly good fragrance, with a nice name. But when Estée introduced Youth-Dew, her market was women in their thirties and forties. That’s the major market for all of us. This is a business about women—and men, too—wanting to stay looking young longer. And it’s in their thirties and forties that Americans start worrying about losing their youthful looks and begin turning seriously to perfumes and cosmetics for help. We have to grab our customers during those golden years. But the trouble with Youth-Dew today is that women who started using the product twenty-five years ago are now in their fifties and sixties, and let’s face it, Youth-Dew today is considered an old ladies’ scent. Over at Lauder, they realize they’re losing their younger market, and so now they’re busily developing new products to try to recapture this market. You’ve got to keep moving forward in this business. You can’t just sit back and enjoy the success of a certain product. And you can never go backward.

  “But to get back to my father, and what he did, or what he tried to do. First of all, you have to remember that among the other tremendous problems he inherited was what we still refer to here as the Candied Apple Fiasco. Whenever we sense some sort of a problem brewing with a product, we still say, ‘Beware of the Candied Apple!’ Or, ‘Is there a Candied Apple in the woodpile?’ Candied Apple was a lip and nail shade that my grandfather introduced a couple of years before he died. It was a disaster. Who knows why? Sometimes there’s no clear answer to why a product, or a color, just refuses to catch on, but Candied Apple was one of these. It just didn’t fly, as we say in the trade. I still think the name is kind of cute, and the color was … well, it was the color of the candied apples they sell at carnivals. The shade seemed to have a lot of fun things going for it. The ads were full of roller coasters and merry-go-rounds and Ferris wheels. But the shade just would not move off the shelves. Maybe the name wasn’t sexy enough, wasn’t sophisticated enough. Maybe it sounded too gloopy and teenagey. Maybe the name reminded women of the acne set. Maybe it sounded too digestive. Who knows? But, whatever it was, the customers, as we say, stayed away in droves. Candied Apple was the Edsel of the cosmetics business.

  “My grandfather blamed my father for the failure of Candied Apple, which was really unfair. My father had nothing to do with developing the shade, and the name was my grandfather’s—the names were always his. But what happened was that, when they were spot-testing the products, my father brought some samples home to Mother, and Mother loved Candied Apple. She loved the color, and she loved the name. My father passed this fact along to my grandfather, and as a result of this one-woman sampling of public opinion, Grandpa immediately decided that Candied Apple was going to be the hit of all time. He immediately upped the advertising and promotion budget. He hired extra salesmen. He quadrupled the produc
tion order. And then, when Candied Apple fell flat on its face, he blamed Daddy for the enormous production overrun. That was the way Grandpa’s mind worked. He could never take the blame for any business misjudgment himself. It had to be someone else’s fault. In the case of Candied Apple, Daddy became the scapegoat—just for passing along the word that my mother liked the shade!

  “It was ridiculous, it made no sense. As you know, my grandfather never had a very high opinion of my mother, never thought she was good enough for his precious oldest son. Why did her vote have so much weight in this particular matter? Who knows? Maybe he was looking for an omen of good fortune, and that was it. In this business, we’re always looking for omens, portents. Charlie Revson would never hire anyone if the number on his license plate added up to thirteen. I’m superstitious, too. Why am I having my launch party for Mireille on the seventeenth? Because an astrologer told me that this would be the most auspicious date for me!

  “Anyway, I won’t say that the Candied Apple Fiasco was the sole reason for the horrible state of affairs the company was in when Grandpa died, but it certainly hadn’t helped. And among all the other problems my father inherited when he took over the company were thousands and thousands of unsold tubes and bottles of damned Candied Apple sitting around in Miray warehouses, gathering dust, where they were already beginning to call it Rotten Apple. It wasn’t just a question of changing the name and reintroducing the shade as something else. That’s often done in this industry. Candied Apple had been given very distinctive packaging: each lipstick tube had a bright red apple on its cap, and the top of each polish bottle was also an apple shape. So, part of Daddy’s plan to rescue the company in its emergency situation was to try to unload the Candied Apple overstock, to get rid of the loser. It made good sense to me at the time. Of course, I was desperately young then—barely twenty—and not very clever and knew none of the things about the beauty business that I know now. I was a babe in the woods, and I adored my father. To me, he was the handsomest, smartest, bravest man in the world—the knight in shining armor who was going to charge forth and save the company single-handedly. As I say, given hindsight and what I know now, I would probably have to revise that opinion. Daddy made one fatal mistake. What he tried didn’t work, but it was a brave try.