Shades of Fortune

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  “And you have to remember that, over the years, my father had been given fancy titles but no authority, no real power. All the final decisions were made by my grandfather. There are subtleties in this business that maybe my father hadn’t grasped, but then how could he have? No one had ever consulted him on anything. My grandfather may have been a tough administrator, but he was a lousy teacher. After Grandpa died, Daddy had about two days to learn everything there was to know about the beauty business!

  “Meanwhile, I’ll always have to give Granny Flo credit for coming forward the way she did. God knows, without her help, we wouldn’t possibly be where we are today. For all her orneriness, for all her contrariness—for her blow-ups like the one at my mother the night of my party—I have to forgive her and remind myself what she did at the time of that crisis, in ’fifty-nine and ’sixty. She proved herself to be a real stand-up lady. At the time, she had more guts than anybody.

  “She immediately put all her properties up for sale, and the timing turned out to be just right. Madison Avenue was already becoming commercial north of Fifty-seventh Street, and Madison and Sixty-first is now an office tower. I have to give Michael Horowitz credit, too; he handled that sale brilliantly. His negotiations for the air rights over that corner piece were fantastic. He also made a beautiful deal for ‘Merry Song,’ Granny’s place in Bar Harbor. Where ‘Merry Song’ used to stand, there are now four hundred and fifteen time-sharing condominiums, a shopping mall, and a marina for medium-sized boats—tacky-looking, but very profitable. Of course, Michael took his commissions on all these deals. He wasn’t just doing this out of the kindness of his heart, but all these were good deals for Granny, and Granny turned over almost all the profits to my father, to help him keep the company from going under. I remember seeing her sitting there, at her desk in the little apartment she moved to at Thirty Park Avenue, just writing out these enormous checks!

  “The yacht, Mer et Son, was more of a problem. It was something of a white elephant. The Arabs and the OPEC boys hadn’t come into the market yet, and nobody wanted a big boat like that. Also, Granny and Grandpa hadn’t been invited to join the Northeast Harbor Fleet Club, so Mer et Son had been lying at anchor for several years in the little cove at the foot of Granny’s lawn. Her hull had become badly silted in, and she was covered with barnacles, and she was listing badly. She looked like hell, and she was probably filled with rats. Finally, Michael was able to make a deal with the U.S. Navy, who agreed to take her over as a training cruiser. No big profit there, of course, but there was a tax deduction, which was helpful.

  “The real white elephant was ‘Ma Raison,’ the Palm Beach house. It’s the biggest house in Palm Beach, you know. It was Grandpa’s final folly. Back in 1960, it went on the market for twenty-two million, but there were no takers. I mean, that house is just too big for anybody … or almost anybody. The zoning laws down there prohibit that property from being broken up and developed. It can’t be put to any commercial or public use. At one point, Michael came up with a scheme to present the house to the U.S. Government, as a winter White House for presidents or visiting foreign VIPs. The government didn’t want it. The upkeep was too much. Over the years, we’ve kept dropping and dropping the price, but still nobody wanted it, and meanwhile the taxes were staggering. It sat there for over twenty years, minimally maintained, looking shabbier and shabbier. And there was another problem with that house. Its central bell tower, which has a beacon on it, was on the main flight path into the West Palm Beach airport. This made ‘Ma Raison’ not just the biggest place in Palm Beach. It was also the noisiest. Right around five o’clock, when you’d think it would be nice to go out for a quiet drink on the terrace, the big jets would start piling in from the north. You couldn’t hear yourself think.

  “Meanwhile, we kept lowering the price. Finally, a couple of years ago, when the best offer we had was four million, Michael Horowitz offered four-point-two and bought it himself. God knows why he wanted it. He got it at a distress-sale price, of course, but four-point-two is better than nothing, and Granny is relieved of those god-awful taxes. And do you know what our smart little sometime friend Michael was able to do? He began putting pressure on the boys at the airport and got them to change their flight-approach pattern. You can do that sort of thing if you’re as rich as Michael Horowitz.

  “But I keep digressing from what my father tried to do.…”

  The first stockholders’ meeting of the Miray Corporation, with Henry Myerson as its new head, was held two days after the reading of Adolph Myerson’s will in the boardroom at Miray’s offices on Fifth Avenue. Only five members attended: Edwee, Nonie, Mimi, Granny Flo, and Henry himself. The Leo cousins, who had been notified of the meeting by telegram had not bothered to attend. Since the departures of Leo and Nate from the company in 1941, the cousins had never bothered to attend stockholders’ meetings, and, today, they were of course unaware of the special gravity of the situation. The five Myersons sat around the big table, while Henry presided from the oversize chair that for nearly fifty years had been the royal seat of the company’s founder.

  “I don’t need to remind you all of the crisis we face,” Henry began.

  “Henny-Penny, your tie’s still crooked,” his mother put in.

  “Mother, please,” Henry said, almost angrily. “Your tie would be crooked, too, if you’d spent the last two days and two sleepless nights trying to make some sense out of the mess this company’s in!”

  “Well, at least sit up straight,” Granny Flo said. “Don’t slump. Your father never slumped.”

  “We face a crisis,” Henry continued, his face visibly perspiring, though the temperature outside had dropped into the teens and, among the emergency measures Henry had already ordered, the office thermostats had been lowered to sixty-five. “We face a crisis, and I’d like to outline to you the emergency measures I’ve already taken. The office staff here is being reduced by twenty-five percent, starting with those most recently employed, and the employees affected have already received their notices. The Miray sales staff in the field is being reduced by another twenty-five percent. Executives who have formerly enjoyed private secretaries will from now on use the services of the steno pool. The company employs a fleet of eleven limousines. This fleet is to be discontinued and the vehicles sold. From now on, executives will use local taxis to get about the city on business. Strict restrictions will be imposed on all business travel, and executives who have previously used first-class air travel will from now on fly economy. Similar restrictions will be applied to all business entertaining, lunches, and so on. The order for the Gulfstream corporate jet that my father placed five months ago has been canceled. Other cost-accounting measures, never imposed in my father’s day, have already been put in place by me, including plans to lease out some five thousand square feet of unneeded office space on the northeast corner of the sixteenth floor. I have placed myself in charge of cost accounting. Finally, I have asked all staff at the executive level to volunteer to accept, at least temporarily, a twenty percent cut in salary. Needless to say, I was the first executive to so volunteer.”

  There was a polite round of applause.

  “But I don’t need to tell you,” he went on, “that all these measures will have roughly the effect of applying a Band-Aid to a gunshot wound in the head. Other, much more drastic measures will need to be taken if we’re going to survive as a corporate entity. These are the measures that I’m going to ask you to vote on here today.”

  There was a suspenseful silence. “Well, tell us what they are, Henny,” Granny Flo said, tightening a knot in her needlepoint.

  “What I’m going to propose to you is a three-point program,” he said. “First, I’m going to ask you to agree that all dividends on Miray stock be discontinued for an indefinite period of time, until this company begins to show some black ink on the bottom line.”

  There was a collective groan around the conference table, but there was also a general nodding of heads.r />
  “Second, I ask your permission to begin immediate negotiations with all banks and financial institutions with whom we have loans, seeking to extend these loans at, naturally, the most favorable rates they can give us.”

  There was more nodding of heads.

  “And, finally,” he said, “the most drastic measure of all. Believe me, I’ve given this idea a great deal of long, hard thought over the past two days, and I’ve come to the conclusion that this may be the quickest, most effective—maybe the only—way we can salvage this company from its present predicament. What I am proposing is an entirely new marketing strategy for Miray products. As you know, under Adolph Myerson’s leadership, Miray positioned itself gradually in an upscale, specialty-store market, working with such upscale outlets as Saks and Magnin’s and Neiman’s. On the other hand, when Miray began its corporate existence back in nineteen twelve, our products were distributed solely through lower-priced and discount outlets—the dime-store chains and neighborhood drugstore and foodstore chains. It was this marketing strategy that got Miray off the ground in the first place, years ago. Ladies and gentlemen, I am saying to you that Miray, unfortunately, finds itself in that same position today—back at the ground floor, reentry level, back at square one. I am saying that, if we are to survive and prosper as we once did, we must reposition all our products in a downscale market. We have a prestige name. In a downscale market, I believe we can compete successfully with such brands as Cutex. As most of of you know, one of the biggest problems facing us right now is a huge warehouse inventory of a shade called Candied Apple. As most of you know, Candied Apple has failed, dismally, to attract the upscale market that the shade was conceived for. I believe that, in a downscale market, the shade will be successful. This will mean slashing our suggested retail prices, of course, but it will also rid us of an enormous, and expensive, overstock, and at a profit. I suggest that this new retail tactic be applied to all Miray products. With Candied Apple, the upscale market appears to have abandoned us. By repositioning ourselves in a downscale market, I believe we can rebuild the kind of success that my father built. We are going back to our roots, as it were—our humble roots. But they are also proud roots. They are honorable roots. They are roots from which we grew to be one of the leaders in the industry. They are roots from which we will grow again, and continue to grow. Like the proverbial South, we will rise again. Ladies and gentlemen, I ask you to approve this proposal. As I said at the outset, it is a drastic one. At the same time, as I see it here today, it may be our only hope.”

  There was silence around the table. Finally, Granny Flo said, “It’s as bad as that, then.”

  “It’s as bad as that, Mother.”

  “I say bravo, Daddy,” Mimi said softly.

  “Well, then,” Henry said. “There you have it, my three-part proposal. Shall we vote on each of the three parts separately, or on all three together?”

  “Together!” Granny Flo snapped.

  “Then how do we vote—for or against?”

  “For,” said Granny Flo without dropping a stitch.

  “For,” said Edwee.

  “For,” said Mimi.

  “Against!” said Nonie loudly.

  “Then,” Henry said, slumping further in his chair, “my proposals have been accepted by a ninety-five percent majority.”

  The next day, in Philip Dougherty’s Advertising column in the New York Times, there was the following headline:

  MIRAY MARKETING SWITCH STUNS INDUSTRY

  In a surprise press conference at the Fifth Avenue headquarters of the Miray Corporation, Mr. Henry Myerson, Miray’s 43-year-old new President and Chief Executive Officer, announced a startling new marketing strategy for his company, makers of a long line of luxury cosmetics, beauty, skin, and hair-care products.

  Miray, long available only at the counters of select specialty and department stores in major cities, will from now on reposition its products in the cheaper retail and discount outlets across the country. “We’ve become too much of a snob name,” Mr. Myerson said. “There’s another, bigger market out there eager for quality products, and we intend to go after that.” Industry analysts announced themselves “stunned” by the latest Miray move. It is the first time in industry history, as far as is known, that a prestige name has chosen deliberately to downgrade itself.

  Amid rumors that Miray may have found itself in fiscal turmoil following the recent death of the company’s 89-year-old founder, Adolph Myerson, the younger Mr. Myerson, who is Adolph Myerson’s son, assured reporters that such rumors are without foundation. “The company’s in great shape,” Mr. Myerson said. “It’s just time for the next generation to take us over and head us in some promising new directions.” Miray, a privately owned corporation whose shares are held by immediate members of the Myerson family, is not required to reveal information pertaining to its financial status. However, some dismissals of company personnel are known to have taken place in recent days, and a recently introduced lipstick and eye-shadow [sic] shade is known to have had disappointing sales. The shade, called Candied Apple, was launched with great fanfare in the fall of 1957, to a poor box office.

  “It’s just a case of the new broom sweeping clean,” said Henry Myerson, referring to the employee dismissals. “I’m the new broom.”

  Meanwhile, spokesmen within the industry remained skeptical about the wisdom of Miray’s about-face reversal in sales strategy. “It’s like taking Tiffany and turning it into J. C. Penney,” said one.…

  “It was a disastrous move,” Mimi says. “Bold, but disastrous. I know that now. I didn’t then. What it did was to almost completely destroy the prestige and respectability and credibility of an old-line name. Years had been spent building loyalty and goodwill among a certain class of well-heeled customers. All that went out the window overnight. How does a woman feel, who’s been used to paying twelve dollars for a lipstick at Saks, when she sees the same lipstick for sale for a dollar nineteen at Walgreen’s or Kmart? She feels angry. She feels cheated. She feels as though someone she’d trusted as an old friend for years—or a lover, or even a husband, I suppose—had been betraying her all along. She feels disgusted. When Daddy decided to give up the carriage trade and go mass-market, he lost whatever we’d had in terms of customer loyalty. You just can’t turn back the clock in this business. Perhaps you can’t do it in any business.

  “Meanwhile, there were several things that could have been done with the Candied Apple overstock. It could have been sold in Europe, or in Japan, or any number of Third World countries. It could have been turned over to a wholesaler and sold under a new label. Or, after a suitable period of mourning, and using the same packaging, it could have been reintroduced under a new, sexy name—Apple of Eve, or Apple of Temptation, neither of which is all that bad, come to think of it.

  “And we had other products that were all doing very well in the specialty-store market. There was no need to tie everything in with the one failure of Candied Apple. But it was as though my father was obsessed with the failure of that one line—perhaps because Grandpa kept saying it was all his fault. So my father decided to have a fire sale on everything, even the products that were popular and profitable. Disastrous. Given hindsight, I see now that Daddy’s problem was more than inexperience. He was naive, an innocent, a babe in the woods.

  “Other problems developed—the Leo cousins, for instance. When their Miray dividends stopped coming in, they understandably wanted to know why. They brought in their lawyers. When the lawyers learned about that little December stockholders’ meeting, they claimed that the vote taken there in favor of Daddy’s plan was illegal. The cousins, after all, held fifty percent of the outstanding shares, and a failure to vote at such a meeting is counted as a vote against the proposal, whatever it is. Daddy had never heard of such a rule and neither had any of the rest of us. So, since they hadn’t voted, the cousins claimed that they had actually voted against Daddy’s proposal. Technically, they were right. And they cl
aimed that Nonie’s negative vote was actually the swing vote—that Daddy’s proposal had actually been defeated by a majority of the shareholders. That’s when the lawsuits started coming in, charging mismanagement.

  “Poor Daddy. During those two short years he had as head of the company, most of his time was spent defending those lawsuits. He grew more and more discouraged and depressed, and the red ink kept pouring in—redder than any red that had been bottled as that goddamned Candied Apple! Thank God for Granny and, I suppose, thank God for Michael.…

  “Those two years were terrible years for Daddy. He aged terribly. I watched as my handsome father’s thick, dark head of curly hair grew completely white. I watched his fine, athletic figure develop a stoop. In those two years, he seemed to age twenty. Brad and I watched this physical disintegration of his feeling helpless. And my mother was … well, drinking more heavily than ever. No help to him at all. Several times I went to him and said, ‘Is there anything I can do to help, Daddy? Can I help?’ But he’d just look away from me, and say, ‘No … no.…’

  “And then he … well, if it’s true that he was a … you know, a suicide … then those two years were enough to do it, I suppose. I don’t know. Perhaps. He tried to turn back the clock, and he failed. In the end, he knew he’d failed.”

  “Itty-Bitty has to go to the doctor,” her Granny Flo said on the telephone. “He has something called a plantigrade wart, the vet calls it, on his poor little left front foot, and it’s hurting him so. At first, I thought it was just a little blister, from the hot sidewalks, perhaps, but the vet says no, it’s a plantigrade wart. He needs to see a specialist. And the only dog pediatrician we can find is way up in Mount Kisco.”