ENTREPRENEURS: Merchant of Glamour

Charles Revson had an almost eerily unerring sense of what American women wanted—or could be persuaded to want. The autocrat-muse of Revlon, Inc., proved that over and over again in the four decades since he founded the company, most recently in 1973. That was when Revlon introduced a new perfume under the improbable name “Charlie.” Associates grimaced, competitors smiled, and Revson went on talking about how it was perfect for “the woman who is sort of liberated but who isn’t a bra burner.” Revson’s semi-lib market turned out to be there all right—and enormously profitable too. In that first year, Charlie sales exceeded $10 million in the U.S., and today stores sell more Charlie than any other American fragrance.

Guided largely by intuition, Founder Revson built Revlon, of which he was chairman for 44 years, into a cosmetics colossus whose name and some 4,000 products are known around the world, and are popular with women from the mass of Walgreens on up to the class of Saks Fifth Avenue. Long before Revson died of cancer last week at 68, Revlon had become the largest U.S. over-the-counter retailer (1974 sales: $606 million) of lipstick, nail polish and potions that women use to make themselves beautiful.

Beauty Room. The son of a cigar packer who had immigrated to the U.S. from Russia, Revson started out in the cosmetics business in Manhattan during the unglamorous Depression year of 1932. With $300 borrowed from loan sharks—at 24% interest—Charles and his older brother Joseph joined forces with a chemist named Charles Lachman, who was to become the l in Revlon. Working out of a rented room on the West Side, the three began making a creamy, opaque, nonstreak nail polish that Lachman had developed. Initially, they sold to beauty parlors, which were then enjoying a boom because of the popularity of the permanent wave. By 1941, Revlon was selling to nearly all the nation’s estimated 100,000 beauty salons. Before long, the company also was offering women lipstick and nail polish that matched—for “matching lips and fingertips,” as one famous ad slogan proclaimed.

In one dazzling advertising barrage after another, Revson kept Revlon moving upward. His 1952 campaign for “Fire and Ice,” a new cosmetics line that was promoted through lush magazine ads featuring Model Dorian Leigh and then-daring teasers in the copy (“Do you close your eyes when you’re kissed?”), was brilliantly successful. So, too, was his decision in 1955 to go into television in a big way by sponsoring The $64,000 Question. That helped boost sales by 54% and earnings by almost 200% in a year. Revson’s promotional trademark was his practice of pairing his products with models who seemed to reflect their times. In the 1950s, it was sleek Suzy Parker, in the 1960s, Barbara Britton. Currently, it is breezy Lauren Hutton.

As owner of 10% of Revlon’s stock, worth nearly $100 million at present, Revson was Revlon’s largest shareholder. He was often more difficult to work for than compete against. Whether he was in Revlon’s offices in Manhattan’s General Motors Building or out entertaining on his 257-ft. yacht, Ultima II, he followed every detail of the business—right down to discouraging pantsuits for women and beards for men at Revlon headquarters. He frequently went against the advice of subordinates, as in 1966, when he bought a small drug company and absorbed it into Revlon as USV Pharmaceuticals. Last year the company’s health-care lines accounted for 27% of Revlon’s earnings of nearly $50 million.

Cancer Surgery. Thrice married, most recently to Lyn Fisher Sheresky Revson, whom he divorced in 1974, Revson was aware that he was dying after cancer surgery last year and began to look for a successor. The man he chose is Michel Bergerac, 43, former president of ITT-Europe, a capable, urbane Frenchman (and naturalized U.S. citizen) who was lured to Revlon by a $5 million contract and a chance to run his own show. Bergerac plans to work on, among other things, developing greater management depth at Revlon—one detail that never interested Revson.

With Revson’s death, only Estée Lauder, whose firm is Revlon’s biggest competitor in more expensive lines, remains of the U.S. cosmetics industry pioneers. “The industry will miss him,” she said last week. “We need to be kept on our toes.” Painted ones, probably, with matching lips and fingertips.