Esty, Mistress of Makeup Estee: a Success Story

By Martha Duffy

"Shades of Lauder blue are everywhere. Porcelain bowls of French beaded flowers, porcelain birds of jeweled hues, drapes copied from the Schonbrunn Palace in Vienna . . . Oriental carpets resting on Lauder blue carpeting . . . It's very thrilling." Estee Lauder loves her lavish office. She is equally entranced by her three-story Manhattan town house, the 27-room redoubt in Palm Beach, Fla., the Riviera hideaway with gardens "breathtakingly similar" to those of Monet's Giverny, the London flat filled with English antiques she had shipped from America. The charm of her memoir--part cosmetic- mogul tough talk, part Gracie Allen gab--is that Lauder so heartily enjoys her success and so clearly understands how it all came about.

She is in her 70s now (77, according to Israel) and keeps a close eye on her empire. She built an estimated $1 billion-a-year business from a face cream brewed up by her Hungarian uncle (who also made simple fragrances, mudpacks, a poultry lice killer, and who died broke). In the industry she has been an innovator and an astute adapter, popularizing the gift-with-purchase gimmick, scent-free "hypoallergenic" cosmetics (Clinique), and a skin-care line for men (Aramis). Along the way she was helped by her patient husband Joe Lauder, who died nearly three years ago, and especially by her elder son Leonard, 52, who now runs the company.

Estee Lauder's is a classic American success story: the child of poor immigrants makes good through ingenuity and hard work. But until now that has not been grand enough for this heroine. Lee Israel's unauthorized biography might not exist except for the heavy makeup job Lauder applied to her origins. It is also possible that the lady's own gutsy book would not have seen print without the challenge of Israel's research.

Not for nothing are Lauder's curtains copied from the Schonbrunn Palace. In the past, according to Israel, she has beguiled the press with tales of a gently bred Hungarian-Viennese mother, a Czech father with imperial connections, a childhood spent on an estate in Flushing, N.Y. Now she tells most of the essential truth: her parents were poor Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, and she grew up in the shabby Corona section of Queens. Israel gleefully supplies many more humble details, but Lauder gives what is probably the most important one: as a child, little Josephine Esty Mentzer was ashamed of her parents' shaky English and "their old-country ways." That too is a common strand in the American success saga. People who go back to the Corona days remember a pretty, lively girl with "gorgeous, gorgeous" skin. From the time Esty decided that something might be done with Uncle John's skin formulas, she worked tirelessly behind cramped counters, in the waiting rooms of store buyers, pushing, touching, smearing, charming, hectoring. When she first met Helena Rubinstein, she told her that Lauder Creme Pack would do much to smooth out Madame's neck. (Decades later she astounded Jeane Kirkpatrick with the suggestion that her clothes aged her. "You mean you don't like what I'm wearing?" gasped the Ambassador.)

Lauder inched along in business 20 years before she brought out Youth-Dew, a pungent bath oil that doubled as perfume. Unsubtle, tenaciously clinging, it had the kind of across-the-board success in the '50s and '60s that Giorgio has enjoyed in the '80s. The fragrance carried the entire line to the privileged position in the world's department stores that Lauder had been fighting for.

She revels in every subsequent triumph. Her book contains pages and pages of how-to tips ("We never keep memos"; "Toughness, let me tell you, is not dependent on being crude or cruel"; "If you're selling beauty, you must smell sweet"). The advice is offered with unabashed pride.

Those qualities are just fine for describing hard-won triumphs. They are a little unsettling when applied to Lauder's other main pursuit, remorseless social climbing. This kind of ambition seems to afflict cosmetic tycoons: Rubinstein, Elizabeth Arden and Charles Revson of Revlon all wooed the rich and especially the titled. Lauder invaded Palm Beach because she realized that swells are more approachable at resorts than on their home ground. She donated small baskets of her products to decorate charity balls, with larger bottles delivered to gracious homes. The Duchess of Windsor, Lauder's main quarry until she fixed on Prince Charles, once wrote her a note saying that she had enough lipsticks.

Lauder burbles about the Begum Aga Khan, Princess Grace, C.Z. Guest. Some old-girl network. Consider this passage: "Pat Buckley was wearing Estee when Nancy Reagan came to visit. Nancy admired the fragrance, and Pat promptly gave Mrs. Reagan her own bottle . . . I like knowing that Estee is present at places that are a long way from Corona."

This sentence helps explain why one indulges Lauder's social greed. Candor and zest count for a lot, and so does unintentional humor. By contrast, Israel's narrative trails off into inconsequence. Though she credits her subject's business skill, she focuses on the puffed-up past, the social climbing, the friends dropped. As a result, the biography lacks a very important ingredient found in the autobiography: a larger-than-life, likable main character.