The Governor's Face Lift

While Gemini 4 orbited the earth, Astronauts Jim McDivitt and Ed White did not brush after every meal, but in stead chewed a new gum called Trident, which helps clean teeth by using enzymes to break down dirt and bacteria.

Trident is a product of Warner-Lambert Pharmaceutical Co., which is well into its own orbit in the new world of pharmaceuticals. Three months ago the company brought out an appetite-suppressing prescription drug, Pre-Sate, which has already taken a substantial bite of that $60 million-a-year market. This month it won five U.S. patents on a "Robot Chemist," a Rube-Goldberg-like device that automatically analyzes up to 120 samples per hour of anything from blood to industrial oil by mixing them with laboratory reagents, measuring the resulting chemical change, and recording the results on adding-machine tape or computer cards. Now the company is beginning national distribution of a new shampoo-base hair coloring and this fall will introduce a line of facial makeup with three colors in one box so women can blend their own.

Selling by Computer. This high productivity of marketable ideas would make it seem that Warner-Lambert has long been a dynamo of invention. Actually, 90% of its drug sales come from products more than ten years old, which is practically a century in that business. The line includes such venerable medicaments as Sloan's Liniment, Smith Brothers Cough Drops, Listerine, Rolaids, and Bromo-Seltzer. Warner-Lambert's newer directions are the result of a corporate turn-around wrought by a man who never ran a business before becoming its president eleven years ago: two-term (1947-54) New Jersey Governor Alfred Eastlack Driscoll.

A rumpled, outdoor type who likes to meditate in his cabin in the Maine woods, Lawyer Driscoll, now 62, transplanted company headquarters from a Manhattan rookery to the suburban calm of Morris Plains, N.J. Lacking new products based on research, he concentrated at first on selling the old ones harder and more imaginatively, later turned to a computer to help his salesmen. The computer sees to it that free samples go to doctors who request them, sizes up each doctor's prescription-writing potential on the basis of information that salesmen supply about the size of his practice.

Makeup for Men? Today Warner-Lambert makes more than 500 products, has recently opened factories in Morocco and Nigeria, has 44 other facilities abuilding or in the design state from Argentina to New Zealand. Under Driscoll, sales have nearly tripled; last year, on a volume of $335 million, earnings after taxes grew 14% to a record $34 million. Says the growth-minded Governor, who retains a politician's knack for sharpening a cliche: "I regard eggs in many baskets as one of our prime strengths."

Still in the incubator of Warner-Lambert's now vast laboratory program are pills to color hair and tablets to increase mental concentration. The company is also developing a line of men's cosmetics, including colognes and skin moisturizers. This may seem a bit far out, but after all, any company that can put chewing gum in orbit may just be the one to put moisturizing lotions on stubbly chins.

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