Books: The Father of Halitosis

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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."