The Father of Halitosis

ALL OUT OF STEP (316 pp.)--Gerard B. Lambert--Doubleday ($4.50).

The venerable employee of the Lambert Pharmacal Co., makers of Listerine, opened his book of news clippings and said: "It says in the British Lancet that in cases of halitosis . . ."

"What's halitosis?" interrupted Gerard Lambert, the company's general manager. "Oh, that is the medical term for bad breath," said the employee.

Before anyone could say "Listerine," Lambert "bustled the dear old gentleman out of the room" and soon, with glistening eyes, he was punching out Listerine's first, fine, fetid halitosis ad. That was in 1922. Ever since, says Lambert in this rousing, readable autobiography, "I have had the fear that my tombstone will bear the inscription, 'Here lies the body of the Father of Halitosis.' " Today, thanks to impish Gerard Barnes Lambert, the world is full of youngsters to whom the pre-halitosis world must seem as remote as that of Chaucer's Wife of Bath. Soon, only toothless oldsters will remain to tell of a time when every bridesmaid took her breath in her stride and no man, wanting the truth, went to a child.

Peerless at Princeton. Listerine was the creation of Lambert's father, a chemist who developed the antiseptic formula (useful in that it was bland and harmless to skin and other tissue). Father Lambert scraped together sufficient funds to get to London and there "invested his last dollar in an elegant carriage with a liveried coachman." Helped by this haughty equipage, he coaxed from Lord Lister, the pioneer of antiseptic surgery, the right to christen the new formula with the great man's name.

Listerine was still a small family affair when Gerard Lambert was born in 1886. But the Lambert Pharmacal Co. was already rich enough to pop huge silver spoons in the mouths of all the little Lamberts. Their St. Louis home was full of the murmur of menservants, and in the dining room of their country mansion, "there were always two little colored girls ... to waft the flies from us with enormous peacock feathers." When the time came for Gerard to go to Yale, he thought it would be wise to case the ancient joint before entrusting his person to it. Horrified by its soiled, congested appearance, Gerard entered Princeton, a place which to him really "looked like a university."

Says he: "With certain qualifications, I was a lonely and shy boy." Princeton seems to have brought out the qualifications. Lambert joined an eating club where, when the "food got too bad, we would upend a long table and shoot the whole mess through a window and out into the street." He recalls: "It did not seem at all odd to have five rooms and finally, in my junior year, to have a limousine with a chauffeur . . . Now and then [the chauffeur would] drive me in my Peerless limousine . . . from my rooms to chapel, a mere few hundred yards. This affectation gave me great delight."

His diploma (Lit. B., signed by President Woodrow Wilson) in his pocket, Lambert married, studied architecture, bought racing cars, lived in six rented homes. In Princeton he built a stately mansion, Albemarle, 192 ft. long and set off by eight superb columns ("We would put up a column . . . take it down and remove half an inch of diameter, and then keep on doing this until the column was right"). Lambert also built the township of Lambrook, Ark., where he invested half a million dollars. Soon Jerry Lambert found himself with personal debts "approaching" $700,000, and went to work for the family business. Within two months Gerard Lambert was the company's general manager, "although I still had no office." Within seven years he had paid off all his debts and changed Listerine from a family nest egg into a national institution.

Brain Waves. To boost it, he founded his own advertising company, Lambert & Feasley, which, in turn, became a great national agency, with accounts such as Life Savers, J. W. Dant, and Phillips Petroleum. Now there was no stopping Listerine. Lambert developed a formula for Listerine tooth paste, turning out a batch himself with a hand press. "Early I reasoned that a new appeal for the same product would be like plowing virgin territory. We started advertising Listerine for sore throat and for dandruff. Then we used the appeal of after shaving."

Money rolled in almost faster than Lambert could cope with it. A single brain wave (involving a stock-listing arrangement for the company), which struck him suddenly when he was stuck under the Hudson River in a train, made him $10 million without a stroke of work. A second brain wave (involving the sale of his advertising agency to the Lambert Co.), descending on him in a Pullman sleeper, brought another $5,000,000. Finally, bored with moneymaking, Lambert sold all his own holdings, and "from that day to this I have never tried to make another dollar." It is not surprising that most of the remainder of this autobiography is about yachts.

How to Win. Except for a lighthearted excursion into the Gillette Co. (where he invented a one-piece razor and the "Blue Blade" and paid off $20 million of the company's debts), Lambert has kept busy away from industry. He has learned to paint, to play politics (for Republican candidates), to write thrillers (Murder in Newport). As owner-skipper of the famed yachts Yankee, Vanitie and Atlantic, he has lost the last of his loneliness and shyness amid Morgans and Vanderbilts.

The book is written with a kind of rich man's folksiness, the author being supremely sure that every reader will be interested in his views on why it is good to have money, in the family album snapshots of his children and his recollections of the great. At one point Lambert tells the Einstein anecdote in which the Father of Relativity, asked by Harold ("Mike") Vanderbilt if he likes yacht-racing, replies: "No, Mr. Vanderbilt, I am not interested in anything like that; it is so obvious that one of them must win." That was never obvious to the Father of Halitosis, who knows that to win takes skill (in sailing) and advertising (in business). In fact, Lambert's chief message to mankind is that the man who builds a better mousetrap and expects the world to beat a path to his door without advertising will leave not a yacht behind.

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