Certain People

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  John Johnson is a stocky, compactly built man with close-cropped hair and a narrow moustache, whose face bears a strong resemblance to that of the late Martin Luther King. Moving about his office or apartment, smiling easily and talking with his big, easy voice, he seems a bundle of tightly compressed energy. He gestures with his hands, fidgets in his chair, jumps up and down, seems unable to sit in one place for longer than a moment. To relax, he has taken up golf. In business, he had adopted the philosophy of the late Marcus Goldman, founder of Goldman, Sachs & Company: “Always say no,” he says. “If you say no first, you can always change your mind later on and say yes.” He insists he bears no bitter feelings about the hardships of the old days, or those that accompanied his upward climb—no hard feelings about what he and many other blacks feel is a conscious conspiracy among whites to keep blacks down, and in their place. Yet when he talks about such things, his big fists clench, and his eyes cloud over and focus on some inner space. He turns, mid-sentence, and gazes out the window.

  His wife is outwardly more easygoing. Dressed by designers such as Dior, Givenchy, and St. Laurent, she seems more comfortable in her surroundings, both at home and in the office. She is Ebony’s fashion editor, and also directs the Ebony Fashion Fair—an annual traveling fashion show that tours American cities and raises hundreds of thousands of dollars yearly for black charities. Twice a year, she goes to Europe to select the fashions for the show and, while she is there, her husband, who also follows fashion, badgers her by trans-Atlantic telephone with suggestions, tips, ideas. Eunice Johnson personally hand-picks—though, again, with her husband barraging her with suggestions—all the models for her shows, as well as those who are used in Ebony’s fashion pages, and has been responsible for developing the modeling talents of such black models as Naomi Sims. In winters, Eunice Johnson vacations alone in the family’s Palm Springs house, while her husband stays behind and works. (When Johnson bought the Palm Springs house, with its heated swimming pool, he realized that, though he was over fifty, he had never learned to swim; there had never been enough time.) In many ways, Eunice Johnson is just as driven as her husband and, when there are white guests at her dinner table, and her black cook produces dinner rolls that are—to Eunice’s way of thinking—not sufficiently heated, she becomes visibly perturbed. Though John Johnson has managed to lose all traces of a Southern, or Negro, accent, Eunice Johnson—oddly, in spite of her educated background—has not. When Northerners, or whites, fail to understand her, she also becomes upset, and her eyes turn inward.

  It would be easy to suppose—easy, particularly, for a white person to suppose—that John Johnson’s meteoric rise, his Horatio Alger rags-to-riches success story, would have made him the cynosure of all eyes among blacks, that black parents from the ghettos as well as from the middle class would point to his photograph when he dines at the White House, and say to their children, “See what that man did? You can do it too!” It would be simple to guess that, particularly among the many black rich, and more particularly among the many black rich in Chicago, John Johnson and his wife would be regarded as contemporary heroes, and that they would be sought after universally by those in black society and by anyone who had attained, or wanted to attain, a modicum of success in the business world. It would be nice to think that all this is what has happened. But, alas, it is not quite the case. Though the Johnsons have frequent public functions to attend, they have few private friends. Public functions seldom take place on weekends. When the Johnsons are alone on a Saturday in their enormous apartment overlooking the huge silver lake, their telephone seldom rings and, as the sunset turns the tall stone and glass facade of Lake Shore Drive to gold, John and Eunice Johnson prepare for a quiet evening at home.

  4

  Johnson vs. Johnson

  One frequently finds, in the marriages of successful black families, a situation like that of the John Johnsons—where a dark-skinned man is married to a relatively light-skinned woman. In fact, it is only rarely the other way around. Also noticeable is the fact that the wife is often better educated, and from a “better,” older established family, than her husband. There are several reasons for this, some of them quite complex.

  One reason is psychological. An ambitious black man, eager to rid himself of the shackles of poverty, often considers it both a business and social asset to marry, as one man puts it, “one of these light-skinned beauties.” Light-skinned black women are quite aware of this and know, when it comes to marriage, that they can take their pick, and will often choose, among various suitors, the man who is the most successful, or who shows the greatest promise. Despite such slogans as “Black is Beautiful,” white looks are still the American standard, and the Lena Homes of the black world—who are not only light-skinned but also have no visible “black features”—have by far the best time of it.

  There is also an historical factor. In the days of slavery, there was a distinct difference between the house slave and the field slave, and an important caste system developed among the slaves themselves, one which continues to exist today. It is not uncommon to hear a black person say, with more than a touch of pride, “My ancestors were all house slaves.” The house slaves were at the top of slavery’s pecking order, and their descendants know this. In the South, house slaves were selected for their intelligence, their cleanliness, their reliability and honesty—and their looks. If a house slave failed to demonstrate these qualities, he or she was banished to the fields. Field slaves were selected for their strength and health, and not much else—their ability to work hard, long hours in the out-of-doors in the chill of winter and the steaming heat of summer. From the earliest days of slavery there was little commingling between the house servants and the field hands, whom the house servants regarded as “trash.”

  In the houses of Southern planters, the house slaves were better treated. In a real sense, they had to be, for they were entrusted with caring for children, preparing meals, running the house, caring for guests. In many households, slaves were treated almost as members of the family and, working as maids, cooks, nurses, and laundresses, the house slaves were predominantly women. In the house, these women learned the ways and manners of Southern gentlefolk—how to set a table properly, how to arrange flowers, how to keep silver gleamingly polished, how to treat good furniture (and how to distinguish it from bad), and otherwise how to run a manor house. Because, in many wealthy Southern families, the children were taught by tutors, with the children’s nurses in charge of seeing to it that they did their lessons, many of these women became self-educated—learned, at least, to read and write, which their fellow slaves in the fields had no real opportunity to do. These women learned to behave and talk, and also to think, like members of the Southern white aristocracy.

  There were, of course, throughout the long years of slavery, many liaisons between the female house slaves and the male plantation owners or their sons. The lighter-skinned offspring of these unions were frequently acknowledged by their fathers, especially the girls, and especially the “pretty” little girls. The boys were needed for work in the fields, and were usually dispatched there as soon as they were old enough, but the pampered little girls were frequently sent to the North, or even to Europe, to be educated. The descendants of these light-skinned, well-educated little girls are the grandes dames of black society today.

  After slavery was abolished, the same sort of situation prevailed. If there was education in a Southern black family, it was usually on the mother’s side. In the next generation, if there was sufficient money to educate children, it was the daughters who benefited from it. This was a matter of sheer practicality, at first; the boys were needed at home, to work on the little farms. Later, it became almost a tradition that, if anyone in the family were to be highly educated, it should be the women. Of course, when these women returned home from their schools and colleges, they often found only less well educated, and in many cases darker-skinned, black men to marry. It is one reason for the dominance of the
mother’s role in black family life.

  In Chicago, George Johnson’s background—and success—are very similar to John Johnson’s, though the men are in no way related. Perhaps this is why they do not get on. John Johnson laughs off the talk about long-standing friction between the two Johnsons, and says, “Sure, we’ve had our differences from time to time—but it was never anything serious. Eunice and I were invited to George’s son’s wedding, weren’t we?” George Johnson is more guarded, and says, “I’d rather not talk about it,” and adds, “Nobody will ever change Johnny.” Part of the trouble may boil down to simple business rivalry, for George and John Johnson are the two richest black men in the city, and possibly in the country, and it is nip and tuck from day to day which Johnson is richer than the other. With the same name, people are forever mixing the two men up, giving one Johnson the credit for something the other Johnson has done, and this has been a galling situation on both sides. Also, George Johnson is nearly ten years younger than John Johnson, and, to some people, appears to have achieved his success more rapidly.

  A reservoir of envy between the two men, which had developed over the years, was supplied afresh not long ago when—or so it seemed to George Johnson—John Johnson overstepped himself and moved into George’s territory. George Johnson’s fortune has been made through his Johnson Products Company, which manufactures a wide range of black cosmetics such as Ultra Sheen and Afro Sheen. Johnson Products Company had long advertised in Johnson Publications, particularly Ebony. Then, all at once, Johnson Publications announced that it, too, was going into the cosmetics business. George Johnson was, quite understandably, less than happy with this development, which he considered unduly competitive. To add insult to injury, John Johnson’s cosmetics line, called Fashion Fair, was designed for a better-heeled market, and would be sold in such elegant specialty stores as Neiman-Marcus in Dallas, and Bloomingdale’s in New York. George Johnson’s wares had always been sold in drugstore and supermarket chains, and were much less expensively priced. Not only did it seem to George that John was invading his cosmetics business, but also that John was, in some ways, saying that his were the finer products.

  Naturally, John Johnson advertised his fledgling cosmetics line in Ebony. Naturally, George Johnson scrutinized his rival’s advertising campaign closely. It began to seem to George Johnson that John Johnson was giving himself preferential treatment in terms of where in the magazine Fashion Fair’s advertisements were being placed. George Johnson complained to John about this, and, when his complaints seemed to be ignored, George Johnson grew bitter. Finally, George Johnson angrily withdrew all Johnson Products advertising from all Johnson publications. For many months, both Johnsons sulked in their respective tents. Eventually, the two men patched things up somewhat, and George Johnson returned to Ebony with his advertising. But relations between the two have remained notably cool. When George Johnson was invited to be on a television panel to discuss the situation of blacks in Chicago, he declined when he learned that John Johnson would also be on the panel.

  To people who know and admire both men, it seems a pity that the two most successful blacks in Chicago do not get on. And yet it is perhaps inevitable that there should be a certain amount of professional jealousy between two men who have worked so hard and long against what seemed a common adversary—the white Establishment. Like John Johnson’s, George Johnson’s battle began when he was very young and, like John Johnson, he also had an ambitious mother. Johnson was born in 1927 in the little town of Richton, Mississippi, where his father worked in a lumber mill. Like many rural black girls, George Johnson’s mother married young and started having children right away. She had given birth to three sons when her brother and sister in Chicago wrote to her of better conditions there, “and that great lady,” as George Johnson puts it, “decided to pack us all up and move us north.” Priscilla Johnson and her three little boys boarded a bus and arrived in Chicago on a Saturday. The following Monday morning, she started working at Michael Reese Hospital. She was a little over seventeen years old.

  Growing up in Chicago, the Johnson boys attended public grammar schools and high school, shined shoes together as a team, and divided a paper route. After high school, George’s older brother went to work for the Fuller Products Company, a manufacturer of black cosmetics, whose president, S. B. Fuller, has been credited with helping a number of young blacks get their start in business, though Mr. Fuller’s own business later fell upon hard times. When George Johnson graduated from high school, he too was able to get a job at Fuller Products, and eventually the boys managed to get their mother a job there too, working in the labeling division. By the early 1950s, George Johnson had been made a production manager at Fuller.

  In 1950, Johnson married Joan Henderson, a tall, slender, and beautiful light-skinned girl two years younger than he who had been his high school sweetheart. At the time, Joan had had a year and a half of college. It looked as though their future would be reasonably secure, but their first son was born with a deformed foot, which required a series of expensive operations and therapy. To help pay the mounting medical bills, Joan Johnson went to work—a thing that proud black men, like Old World husbands, consider a mark of shame. George Johnson himself took a second job as a busboy, working fifteen hours a day, and on weekends he worked as a door-to-door salesman and ran a car-wash rack. Most of those early years, Johnson remembers feeling that he might momentarily collapse from physical exhaustion.

  Then, by chance one day he stepped onto an elevator at Fuller, where he noticed that his fellow passenger was a black man with “a disgusted look on his face,” and Johnson fell to talking with the man. The man, it seemed, was a barber on Chicago’s South Side, who had come for help to a black company and had been turned down. George Johnson listened sympathetically, and the man invited him to come down to his barbershop. Though the shop was outwardly unprepossessing, when he entered the door George Johnson was impressed to see signed photographs of such men as Duke Ellington and Nat “King” Cole. All the stars of the black entertainment world, it seemed, came to Orville Nelson’s barbershop when they were in Chicago to have their hair “processed,” or straightened.

  Essentially, all hair straighteners consist of sodium hydroxide, but Johnson immediately saw that Orville Nelson’s straightener was a crude product. It was burningly painful to apply to the scalp, and there were often other, more unpleasant, side effects—broken or falling hair, or an itching rash. What was needed, Johnson saw, was an emulsifier—lanolin, mineral oil, or some other oil or combination of substances—to make Mr. Nelson’s straightener a product that would be smooth, creamy, painless, and safe to use. At Fuller, George Johnson had learned a bit about emulsifiers. He had also heard tales about people like Madame C. J. Walker of Indianapolis, a manufacturer of black cosmetics who had become the first woman in America to earn a million dollars, and who had died leaving her daughter a huge fortune. (Madame Walker adopted the title “Madame” because it was something of a tradition in the cosmetics industry; the late Helena Rubinstein, for example, liked to call herself “Madame Rubinstein.” The formula for Madame Walker’s first hair straightener for “wayward, wrinkled hair” came to her, she said, in a dream.) Johnson took some of Mr. Nelson’s hair straightener away with him and, in his lunch hours, began experimenting with various emulsifiers. He also had a friend named Herbert A. Martini, a German chemist, who had a small laboratory. Martini became interested in the problem, and offered to help Johnson try to solve it. When George Johnson was not working during his Fuller lunch hour or at Martini’s lab, he mixed and stirred ingredients over his kitchen stove and sink.

  After about six months, Johnson and Martini had arrived at a formula that satisfied them, and brought the result to Orville Nelson. Nelson tried it on his customers, who were immediately so ecstatic that Nelson suggested that he and Johnson form a partnership and go into business together. Nelson, with all his celebrity contacts, would be in charge of sales and promotion. Johnson woul
d be in charge of manufacturing.

  When George Johnson presented this idea to his mother, she told him he was crazy. It would mean giving up his good job at Fuller Products. But Johnson, arguing that nothing ventured was nothing gained, insisted that he be allowed at least to try, and his wife, Joan, supported him, believing that it was worth the gamble. And so, in 1954, George Johnson left Fuller Products, his wife took another job, with the criminal court, and the hair straightener called Ultra Wave Hair Culture was officially launched. Johnson and Nelson had figured it would take about $500 to get their new business underway. When George Johnson approached a white loan company for his $250 share, explaining that he wanted the money to start his own business, the loan manager piously explained that blacks did not do well in business. “He told me that he was going to do me a favor, and not give me the money,” Johnson says. Undaunted, he went down the street to another branch office of the same loan company. This time, however, he said that he wanted the money to take his wife on a vacation to California. For this purpose, he was quickly given his $250. In its first day of operations, Johnson’s little company was down to exactly one dollar in the bank.