Word: revson
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...salons to the most crowded discount houses (it is even test-selling a few products in supermarkets). Equally important, it has survived triumphantly the moment of maximum danger for a cosmetics company: the death of the founder. The test came four years ago with the terminal illness of Charles Revson, a free-spending, profane, tyrannical but occasionally lovable entrepreneur who had built Revlon largely...
Possibly sensing that his company had grown too big to be run out of his hat, Revson in late 1974 recruited as his successor a man with a completely different personality: Michel Christian Bergerac. Tall, suave and mustached, he is a French-born Basque who looks and talks (in Gallic-flavored English) like the kind of smoothy who should be running a cosmetics empire. But he started out as an electric power salesman, trained as a manager in the ITT cauldron, and rose to head that conglomerate's European operations, a job that taught him about acquisitions, finance...
...running all ITT European operations from a base in Brussels. By encouraging still more acquisitions and spurring the companies' internal growth, he doubled European sales during the next three years to $5 billion. He was a prime candidate to follow Geneen as head of ITT when Revson, who realized he was dying of cancer, started a search for a successor who could bring the company professional management...
...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...