how to make the ingredients in her
own kitchen, and she began spruiking
his products before eventually striking
out on her own. She would sell to
women in local hair salons, performing
demonstrations in the belief that a
quality product could sell itself. She
was right. “Touch your customer, and
you’re halfway there,” she would say.
One of her home-brewed lipstick
shades was presciently named
“Duchess Crimson” after the Duchess
of Windsor, a socialite with whom
Lauder would become close friends.
In 1930, she married Joseph
Lauter, a textiles businessman with
Austrian heritage, and they later
changed their name to Lauder – an
alteration she said was a return to the
original European spelling. It also
complemented Estée – a play on her
middle name and her preferred
nickname. The couple moved to
Manhattan and Lauder gave birth
to a son named Leonard in 1933.
“Ambition” is the word her son later
chose to describe his mother to Time
magazine, and she continued to grow
her business in an era when mostwomen stopped working after
marriage. The couple divorced in
1939 and Lauder and her son moved
to Miami, though she remarried
Joseph just a few years later and
they had a second son, Ronald.
The couple’s partnership in life
and business endured until the
latter’s death in 1983, with Lauder
describing their relationship as “one
of the greatest love stories of all time.”
The Lauders founded their
business as equal partners in 1946,
operating out of a room above the
prestigious Stork Club in New York,
a favourite haunt of the day’s VIPs.
In 1947, Lauder’s first big break came
with an $800 US order from Saks
Fifth Avenue. The product sold out
in just two days. A consummate
saleswoman, Lauder was relentless
in her pursuit of luxury retailers.
She instinctively understood the
importance of myth building, and
wanted her products on the floor of
high-end beauty counters, rather than
lost on the shelves of a chemist. She
hounded Harrods in London for years
before finally convincing them to stock
her products, and legend has it when
executives at Galeries Lafayette in
Paris said no, she “accidentally” spilt
some of her perfume on the ground,
prompting shoppers to enquire
about the intoxicating aroma. It
was her nose for both fragrance
and business that put the company
on the fast track to success.
The introduction of Youth-Dew
perfume, a heady blend of rose,y.T
hough it was sometimes
said she was the daughter
of Viennese aristocrats,
Estée Lauder was in fact
born Josephine Esther
Mentzer in the working-class
neighbourhood of Corona in Queens,
New York. Her birth date is reported
as July 1, 1908, though it may have
been earlier. “You ask my age? I tell
you it simply doesn’t matter,” was her
mantra. She was one of six children
of Jewish-Hungarian immigrants
and grew up above her father’s
hardware store, with a mother whose
fascination with beauty sparked her
own early interest in skincare. In
her autobiography, Lauder recalls
brushing out her mother’s long hair
and watching enraptured as she
applied various potions – a passion that
later manifested in the makeovers
that a teenage Lauder would give to
the girls at her high school. She was
ashamed, as a child, of her parents’
foreign roots and heavily accented
English. “I wanted to be 100 per
cent American,” she wrote. But it
was family that would set her life’s
trajectory and remain at the heart of
her empire in the decades to come.
While still at school, Lauder
became absorbed in the work of her
uncle Dr Schotz, a chemist who lived
nearby and who made, among less
glamorous products, beauty creams
and fragrances. (According to The New
York Times, one of his formulations
even contained a primitive version of
sunscreen.) Dr Schotz taught Lauder“I DIDN’T GET
THERE BY WISHING
FOR IT OR HOPING
FOR IT, BUT BY
WORKING FOR IT”Lauder with
her husband
and business
partner, Joseph.(^192) | marieclaire.com.au
PHOTOGRAPHY BY EDWARD URRUTIA; NORMAN PARKINSON/ARCHIVE/ICONIC IMAGES; MEGA AGENCY; GETTY IMAGES..