Cosmetics: Kiss and Sell

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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."

Why did Bergerac leave ITT to head a much smaller, though still giant, company? One reason may have been the grind of ITT. Geneen drove his executives at a frenzied pace; in Brussels, Bergerac worked about 80 hours a week. Geneen also conducted marathon monthly meetings that sometimes lasted for four days, at which subordinates were expected to spout reams of figures on cue and might be publicly humiliated by the boss if they could not do it. Associates remember Bergerac as always smiling and calm in this pressure cooker, but they cannot imagine that he enjoyed it.

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, guinea hens, sheep, steers.

The farm is not a commercial venture. 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 budgets. Though his company must stay attuned to the disco scene, Outdoorsman Bergerac has no taste for it himself. "You will never see me in Studio 54," he vows.

To induce Bergerac to switch companies, Revson offered him one of the lushest deals hi corporate history: a $1.5 million bonus just to sign, plus $325,000 a year guaranteed, plus some incentive payments geared to the growth of sales and profits. Last year Bergerac collected $794,000. The deal for a while caused the financial press to call Bergerac by the spectacularly inappropriate nickname of "Catfish," after Catfish Hunter, the pitcher whom the Yankees signed to another seven-figure contract at about the same time. Oddly, in Brussels, Bergerac presented himself as an American executive called Mike; back in the U.S. he is referred to as Michel, which seems more appropriate for a cosmetics king.

Bergerac, a man of broad intellectual interests—art, architecture, African geography and history —clearly is fascinated at