Word: revlon
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Revson knew the Bergerac name; Michel's older brother Jacques, a onetime movie actor and briefly the husband of Ginger Rogers, worked for Revlon (he heads its French operations). Michel and Revson had a meeting at the Palm
...restaurant in Manhattan, at which, another Revlon executive recalls, the clatter of dishes kept drowning out Revson's words, and Revson could scarcely fathom Bergerac's accent; neither understood much of what the other said. Bergerac remembers asking Revson at another meeting: "Why do you want somebody like me? I have been associated for a long time with basically technical products, so I know a fair amount about factories, marketing and technical engineering, but ..." Revson's reply: "I know all that, but you have one thing this company needs. You know how to make money...
Bergerac will now work as late into the night as may be required at the Revlon headquarters in Manhattan's General Motors Building (known as General Odors because several cosmetics firms are perched there). But he believes that "if one gets completely immersed in work seven days a week, one loses his balance and that is not good." So he insists on leaving weekends free to take his wife and daughter Mary Jennifer, 20,* to the theater or to his 300-acre Fox Ridge Farm in upstate New York. There, Bergerac has surrounded himself with a menagerie: dogs, ducks, goats...
...Bergerac simply loves animals and delights in feeding lettuce to a goat named Dudley by hand. He sees no inconsistency in also being a big-game hunter who takes his family on an African safari almost every year; he considers Kenya the most beautiful place in the world. At Revlon, he has fixed up a sanctuary next to the lavish chairman's office: an African room decorated with an antelope-skin rug and a huge mural of Kenyan plains showing giraffe, zebra, water buffalo and other animals and that he can gaze at to rest his eyes from reading Revlon...
...smell at all, and he is wryly amused by the copycat nature of the industry. Any new shade or fragrance that looks salable will almost instantly spur development of three or four nearly identical competing products. Says Bergerac: "Maybe that is one definition of creativity." He denies that Revlon stoops to any industrial espionage, though he believes competitors do and suspects that such shenanigans are inefficient anyway. More than once he has floated false rumors of what products Revlon would introduce next?and then sat back to laugh while rivals scrambled to reproduce those nonexistent products. Did he have...