Soap Opera

To New York's Idlewild Airport on a sunny morning sped Charles Luckman, 40, the hustling, $300,000-a-year president of Lever Bros. There, a sleek Constellation rolled to a halt and from it stepped his two bosses, who also happen to be two of the world's most potent tycoons--pipe-smoking Sir Geoffrey Heyworth, boss of Britain's Lever Brothers & Unilever, Ltd., and Paul Rykens, boss of Holland's Lever Brothers & Unilever N.V. Between them, Sir Geoffrey and Rykens run the globe-girdling Lever soap empire with some 500 subsidiaries in over 40 countries.

Blue-eyed Chuck Luckman greeted them warmly, bundled them into his waiting Cadillac and whisked them off to Manhattan. If he assumed that this was just another routine inspection tour, he was soon disillusioned. Two days later, after almost continuous conferences in Luck-man's Waldorf Towers apartment, Luckman had moved out of his job.

The decision was made in haste and apparently in considerable heat. Sir Geoffrey waited three days before he summoned Luckman's 23 top assistants to the company's Manhattan boardroom to break the stunning news. "We and Mr. Luckman," he told them, "have disagreed over future policy and have been unable to resolve our differences and we have had to agree to part."

While everyone waited to hear what the dispute was about, Sir Geoffrey merely added: "It is seldom helpful on such occasions to talk about the cause." Chuck Luckman shut up just as tightly.

Wonder Boy. What had caused the jet-propelled wonder boy of U.S. selling and Lever Bros, to fall out? Certainly Luckman had made many enemies. He had ruthlessly cleaned house when he became president in 1946; he shook things up again last fall when, in moving the headquarters to New York (TIME, Oct. 17), he left several hundred Lever employees behind. Furthermore, in London's dignified Unilever House, Luckman's genius for self-promotion had not gone down well. But Unilever had seemingly been more than willing to overlook all that as long as Lever Bros.' profits had held up. Apparently neither its profits nor its competitive position had.

Wonderment. Procter & Gamble, No. 1 U.S. soap producer for generations, had in recent years pushed Lever even farther back in second place--notably by its aggressive selling of synthetic detergents (soapless cleansers), the industry's biggest postwar phenomenon. Lever's big mistake was its failure to anticipate the popularity of detergents. When Luckman took over, Lever had no detergent on the market. By the time Luckman brought out "Surf" in early 1948, P. & G.'s "Tide" was already sweeping the market--and had no trouble holding its lead.

Luckman, moreover, had spent millions expanding Lever into sidelines which so far have not been profitable, such as home waves (his "Rayve" was no match for "Toni"). He had also bought Jelcke margarine last year just when the margarine industry made its deepest price cuts in years. Even Pepsodent toothpaste, which Luckman himself had built to a par with first-place Colgate's, had again fallen behind. Like other soapmakers, Luckman had also been caught with inventory losses.

In Boston, many businessmen privately quoted figures to show how Lever had slipped. From a $14 million profit in 1947, profits had supposedly dropped to $4,000,000 in 1948 and the deficit for 1949 was estimated as high as $7 million. But since Lever Bros, never publicly reports its earnings, all such figures were guesswork and open to misinterpretation. The figures did not take into account such things as inventory losses which were paid out of U.S. earnings last year, although they will be balanced off later against a reserve set up in London. In any case, the company's financial position had been well-known to Luckman's bosses and was not the reason for the sudden disagreement--in fact, Luckman insisted that the company was in the black.

Showdown. The nub of the row seemed to be that Luckman's British and Dutch bosses wanted to move in some "advisers" to look over his shoulder, either because they were dissatisfied with U.S. operations or intended to make a significant change in the company's global policy. One London report was that Unilever wanted to send permanent representatives to the U.S. to keep a closer check on the U.S. company and thus cut its autonomy.

But, if this was true, Unilever had misjudged Luckman's own driving ambition to be whole boss or no boss at all. At week's end, while the company was being run by three directors who had hastily flown to the U.S. from London, Sir Geoffrey and Rykens were still shopping for Luckman's successor. One rumored possibility: Robert Smallwood, 56, an American who had built Lever's Lipton Tea Co. into a highly profitable operation. As for Chuck Luckman, he had no immediate plans. Settled in Manhattan after moving from Boston, he had already had one bid. "My first offer," he grinned, "was a chairmanship of a Boston company."

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