Part IThe Story
The photographer's name was Olmo, and on March 15, 1954, he made four exposures of a family who had recently run from their own house. The caption slip filed with the negatives survives in a Los Angeles archive, typed in the clipped grammar of a newsroom on deadline: Factors breathe easy after extortion suspect who caused them to flee house with time bomb threat is jailed by FBI. Frames 43 through 45 show them standing, and the caption names them left to right, as captions do: Max Factor, Jr.; Mrs. Mildred Factor, his wife; Donald Factor, 19; and a dog named Rudy. In frame 46 the parents sit and the son stands behind them. The dog is in front, where dogs in family portraits generally end up.
The caption does not record what the man in the middle of the frame was thinking. It does not say how long the family was out of the house, or whether there was ever really a bomb, or who the suspect was. What it records is a pose: a family arranged for the camera after a fright, faces composed, the dog brought in to make it look like an ordinary afternoon. The man had spent most of his life on that exact problem, which is how a face should look once a lens is pointed at it.
He was forty-nine. He had not always been called Max Factor. For his first thirty-four years he was Frank, born Francis, and the name he now answered to had belonged to someone else until the summer of 1938. That spring, in Paris, the original Max Factor had also received a note. It demanded money in exchange for his life. The French police set a trap with a decoy at the drop-off point, and nobody came to collect. The old man, a wigmaker from Russian Poland who had made himself the first name in Hollywood makeup, was so shaken that a local doctor sent him home to California. He went to bed when he arrived and never really got up again. He died in Beverly Hills on August 30, 1938, at sixty, or at sixty-six. The sources disagree about the year he was born, and the disagreement is a family trait.
So when the FBI jailed a man in 1954 for threatening the household of Max Factor, Jr., it was the second time in sixteen years that someone had looked at that name and seen a price. The son had inherited the laboratory, the presidency, the four salons on Highland Avenue decorated for Blondes, Brunettes, Redheads, and Brownettes, and the right to put the signature on every compact sold in Buenos Aires and Bournemouth. He had also inherited the target. The name was a brand, and a brand is a face the public thinks it knows, so it was always going to draw strangers who believed they were owed something by it.
What follows is the story of a man who lived inside a borrowed name for fifty-eight years, used it better than its first owner might have, and then sold it, in 1973, for $500 million.
By the Numbers
The House That Frank Factor Ran
58Years Francis Factor lived under his father's name, from 1938 until his death in 1996
600 gal.Light olive makeup rushed for Ben-Hur in 1925, the firm's biggest order to that date
96%Share of world film studios the company claimed used its professional makeup by 1933
$1Nominal fee paid to studio stars for endorsing Max Factor products
20 lbs.Tension applied to rubber lips by the machine built to kiss-test Tru-Color lipstick
$500MPrice when the family merged Max Factor & Company into Norton Simon in 1973
$1.14BWhat Procter & Gamble paid Revlon for Max Factor and a German sister firm in 1991
A Name Applied Like a Base Coat
The change was legal, and according to one account it was made "at the urging of his family." A later company timeline puts it more sentimentally: The family decides his name should live on so his son, Francis takes on the name Max Factor, Jr. He had his father's gift as a creative make-up artist so this is a natural step. The word natural has a long and strained history in this company. Most of its products were sold as natural, and most of them were engineered to fool a camera.
Before you can understand the son taking his father's name, you have to see how unstable the name already was. The father was born Maksymilian Faktorowicz in Zduńska Wola, or possibly Łódź, in Congress Poland under the tsar, in 1877, or 1872. The company now says August 5, 1872, and the encyclopedias mostly say September 15, 1877. Depending on who is telling it, his father was a grocer, a rabbi, or a textile mill worker. When the family came through Ellis Island on February 25, 1904, in steerage aboard the S.S. Moltke, the long Polish surname was cut down to something an American clerk could spell. Faktorowicz became Factor, and that was the first edit. The second came thirty-four years later, when a younger Factor, already a chemist, already married, already the man who had steered the company's biggest product to retail, put on the first name as well.
One small document from five years before the name change complicates things further. On March 26, 1933, Frank Factor, twenty-eight, married Mildred Dorothy Cohen, nineteen, of Chicago, at the Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard, with Rabbi N. I. Addleson of the West Adams Congregation officiating. On the marriage record the groom gave his occupation as "Chemist, Cosmetics Mfg." and his residence as 1666 North Highland, the factory-salon complex where he worked. In the space for his mother he wrote Jennie Cook, born Russia.
Jennie Cook was not his mother. She was his father's third wife, a neighbor in St. Louis whom Max married on January 21, 1908, when Frank was three. His mother was Esther Rosa, whom his father called Lizzie. She collapsed and died of a brain hemorrhage on March 17, 1906, when Frank was nineteen months old. It would be easy to read too much into the line on the form. He may simply have written down the only mother he remembered. Still, it is the first documented instance of Frank Factor quietly reassigning an identity, and it happened in a business whose central product was the reassignment of identities.
— From the lyric of "Hooray for Hollywood"To be an actor / See Mr. Factor / He'll make your pucker look good!
The song came out around the time the father died. It made "Mr. Factor" a figure of popular comedy, the man you went to if you wanted to be someone else. (The Los Angeles Times once quoted a version in which Mr. Factor "can even make a monkey look good.") The punchline only works if Mr. Factor is a single person. After August 1938 there were effectively two of them, and the public was never told.
The Boy Who Watched the Wigs
The 1910 census found the family at 1205½ Central Avenue in Los Angeles. A shop on South Central advertised itself as Max Factor's Antiseptic Hair Store. Toupees made to order. High grade work. The word antiseptic was doing reputational work. Hair, faces, and paint were matters for barbers and actresses, and in the first decade of the century both were faintly disreputable. The father sold a lice shampoo called Kill 'Em Quick and was the West Coast distributor for Leichner and Minor, two European makers of theatrical greasepaint. According to a story the family liked, he also added hair to horses' tails when a Western needed a fuller-looking mount, and directors said, "Get me Max."
The wigs were human hair and very expensive. The father rented them to producers of Westerns on one condition: his sons had to be cast as extras. Frank and his older brother Davis rode out to the shoots, stood in the backgrounds of early cowboy pictures, and made sure every wig came home at the end of the day. So his first job in the film industry was surveillance, and his first screen appearance was a cover story. He was on camera so that he could keep watch on something more valuable than himself.
He left school in the tenth grade to work in the business full time. Before that, according to the Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives, he and his siblings spent afternoons and holidays at the shop. Davis was born on February 2, 1902, on the other side of the ocean, and was two years older. He became the general manager, the one who made deliveries and later chaired the board. Frank went into the laboratory. That division held for decades: Davis dealt with the outside world and Frank worked on the formulas. Later in the 1920s, the record has Davis running the company while Frank "assist[ed] his father in the development of new products." He did not become the operator until his father died, and he did not become the public face until he took the name.
There is a photograph from 1906 of the family barbershop at 1513 Biddle Street in St. Louis, which offered baths, shaves, and haircuts. An unknown barber stands on the left, Max on the right, and in the center, small and solemn, is Davis. Frank was a toddler at the time and is not in it. He spent a good part of his life just outside the frame of his family's mythology, and then a good part of it at the center of that frame under someone else's name.
The Origin Story Is Also a Cosmetic
The Factor family's account of itself reads like a screenplay, and at least one careful historian of the industry thinks that is because, to a degree, it was written as one.
Most of the official story comes from Fred E. Basten, who did public relations work for Max Factor in Hollywood and later wrote two books about the founder. One was the 1995 coffee-table history Max Factor's Hollywood: Glamour, Movies, Make-Up, written with Robert Salvatore and Paul A. Kaufman. The other was a 2008 biography titled, without any modesty, Max Factor: The Man Who Changed the Faces of the World. In Basten's telling, the father was appointed cosmetics expert to the Russian royal family and the Imperial Russian Grand Opera, was watched so closely by the court that he had to keep his wife and three children secret, and fled either by faking a rest cure at Karlovy Vary or by sledding through frozen woods to a ship waiting in the harbor. Which version you get depends on the teller. One account says the couple kept their marriage secret for nine years and saw each other one hour a week. Basten says the father landed in America with the equivalent of nearly $40,000 and lost most of it when a crooked partner robbed him at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair.
The ship's manifest says $400.
The researcher who runs the archive Cosmetics and Skin went back to the Moltke's passenger list and found a family in steerage with four hundred dollars. He could find no record of Max Factor at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, and he concluded that the swindle "was concocted to explain why Max lacked the means to establish a more impressive business when he settled in St. Louis." He is just as doubtful about the legend that the father moved to Los Angeles in 1908 to join the movies. New York and Chicago were the centers of film production then, and the first Hollywood production company, Nestor, did not open until 1911. It is possible the father simply wanted distance from a bitter custody fight with his second wife, Huma "Helen" Sradkowska, whom he married on August 15, 1906, five months after Lizzie died, and who gave birth to Louis on August 29, 1907. The divorce went to court. He came out of it with all of the children.
This is not a takedown. The impulse behind the myth is easy to understand. A $400 immigrant who opened a barbershop is a story of endurance. A court cosmetician to the tsar who lost a fortune in America and won it back is a story of destiny. Destiny sells foundation better than endurance does, and Basten was in public relations. It is still worth noting that the Factor family began building its legend early, and that Frank grew up inside a household account that was, at least in places, made up.
There is another branch of the family where self-invention went criminal. The father's half-brother John, born October 8, 1892, became known in Chicago as a Prohibition-era gangster and con artist tied to the Outfit. In one family the brothers took different lines of work: one changed how faces looked, the other changed who people believed he was. Frank came of age between those two examples, and he chose the honest one. But it was the same craft.
A Word Respectable People Did Not Say
In 1920, when he was fifteen or sixteen, Frank persuaded his father to change the vocabulary.
Until then the company called its products cosmetics, a respectable word with an apothecary sound. Make-up was what the theater called it, and it was also what the demimonde called it. It suggested greasepaint and gaslight and women of the sort polite families did not invite. The father resisted and then gave in. In 1920 the firm officially began calling its products "make-up," taking the noun from the verb phrase to make up one's face. The company now says that Max Factor invented the word, which is true only if you count the son as part of the father, the very merger the 1938 name change would make legal.
In hindsight the move is easy to state. Frank took the stigma head on. He did not apologize for the theatrical connection; he sold it. A woman in Fresno who bought "make-up" was buying a little of the dressing room, a little of the forbidden, a little of the movie star. The word did not reassure her. It invited her in. The company called its consumer line "Society Make-up" and promised that every girl could look like a movie star.
Two years later the father was snubbed by the people who had been supplying him. In 1922, on holiday in Europe with Jennie, he stopped at the Leichner headquarters in Germany. He was by then the largest retailer of Leichner's stick greasepaint in the world, and they left him waiting at reception. He walked out and cabled his sons to start selling the family's own greasepaint. The Factors had been making it in their own lab for their own clients for years without ever marketing it while they represented other brands. Now they sold it in a collapsible tube instead of a stick, which was more hygienic and went on thinner and more evenly. It soon led the market.
There are two kinds of founders in this sequence, and the Factors had both of them living in one house. The father acted on wounded pride, and that pride ended a twelve-year distribution relationship in an afternoon. The son pushed for a word. The father's move was dramatic and effective, and it was the sort of thing a rabbi's or a grocer's or a mill worker's son does when a German receptionist keeps him waiting. The son's move was quiet and probably mattered more, because it reached every woman in America.
The children kept pressing in that direction. "While Max Factor was satisfied to remain a specialized supplier of products to the film community," one history notes, "his children were convinced they could grow the company into a much larger enterprise." National distribution started in 1927, when an outside firm called Sales Builders took the rights to advertise, distribute, and sell the products. The celebrity endorsement terms were close to free. Paramount, Fox, MGM, Columbia, Warner Brothers, and others contracted their actresses to promote Max Factor for one dollar each, in return for Max Factor's ads promoting their latest films. By 1933 the company was advertising that its professional makeup was used by 96 percent of the world's film studios, and it added the stars to that claim and called its consumer line the "Cosmetics of the Stars." The studios saw the arrangement as free publicity. The Factors saw it as free brand-building. Both were right, and the Factors came out ahead.
The Color of the Room
Every time the camera improved, the faces in front of it became a problem again. That was the company's basic opportunity, and Frank understood it better than anyone in the family.
The first change was the end of orthochromatic film. Orthochromatic stock rendered reds as dark, so stars painted their lips brown to make them look red on screen. Around 1928 the industry moved to faster panchromatic stock, and sound arrived at the same time. Sound killed the noisy carbon arc lamps, which had to be replaced by quieter, cooler tungsten lights. All the existing makeup now photographed wrong. Max and Frank spent six months developing new formulas, and the result was trademarked as Panchromatic Make-up in October 1929. The year before, the father had been given an honorary Academy Award for his work in film. Frank worked on every one of these projects, but his name went on none of them.
Then came Technicolor. The three-strip camera, perfected after 1932, split incoming light into three negatives and needed much brighter lighting. Under those lights, greasepaint's slight sheen worked like a mirror. Actors' faces picked up the colors of the set, so a face near a green wall turned green and a face near a red curtain turned red. Depending on who described it, unprotected faces came out brick red, blue, or green. Stars knew this, and many simply refused to appear in color films. Technicolor was a multimillion-dollar bet that depended on the industry trusting it with its most valuable assets, which were faces. The makeup problem was standing between that bet and its return.
Max Factor & Company was not the only firm working on it. John Hay "Jock" Whitney, a major Technicolor investor born the same year as Frank, seems to have discussed the problem with a friend from the racetrack, Elizabeth Arden. In 1935 Arden bought DeLong Laboratories and Make-up Studio in Hollywood, set up a Screen and Stage division, and supplied a product called Nuchromatic to two color pictures Whitney backed, A Star Is Born and Nothing Sacred, both released in 1937. Arden was a Canadian who had invented herself in Manhattan as a purveyor of skin cream to rich women and built a salon empire behind a red door. She came at the problem from money and society. The Factors came at it from the laboratory.
They had an unexpected handicap. The father had been hit by a delivery van and was recovering, so Frank led the work. It took about two years, split between the Max Factor lab and Technicolor's facilities. The working name was the "T-D" series. The product that emerged was a solid cake applied with a damp sponge, giving a transparent matte finish that hid skin imperfections without shine. Renamed Pan-Cake, it appeared on screen in Vogues of 1938, released in August 1937.
Then the women on the sets began stealing it.
They took it from the studios and wore it at home. The company could barely make enough for the studios, never mind shoppers. Pan-Cake had one real drawback as an everyday product: in its studio shades it made skin look too dark under anything but the enormous lights on a soundstage. Here the father and son split, and the record is unusually clear. The father wanted to keep Pan-Cake for film. The son saw the theft as market research, and he began developing lighter shades for daylight and evening.
Production was increased. The company used the release of Vogues of 1938 and, five months later, The Goldwyn Follies, the second film to use the product, to launch Pan-Cake commercially with a national color advertising campaign. It became, in the language of the company's histories, the fastest and largest selling single make-up item to date. It also became the standard makeup for every Technicolor film. Arden's Nuchromatic does not appear in the same sentence again.
The obituaries could not agree on who deserved the credit. The Associated Press wrote that when actors took Pan-Cake home, "the elder Factor began mass-producing it." The encyclopedias say the father wanted it kept for the studios and the son turned it into a retail product. Both could be true. The father ran the company, so any decision was his. The son did the work that made the decision possible, in a lab, with a sponge and a set of shades. The Scribner entry on Frank has a line that applies to his whole career: "it is difficult to separate Factor's contributions from those of the rest of the family."
He would make sure it stayed difficult. Within eighteen months he took the name.
Twenty Pounds of Tension
The first major product the new Max Factor developed after his father's death was a lipstick, and the first thing he built for it was a machine to kiss it.
Work started in 1939. The specification was demanding for its time: a lipstick that would not smear, would not irritate the lips, and would not change color as it oxidized and warmed on the mouth. Smear is hard to test with people. Human kissers vary, get tired, and lie. So the laboratory built a kissing machine, a pair of rubberized lips that could be pressed together under controlled force. The Los Angeles Times later put the force at twenty pounds of tension. It replaced the human testers and pressed the painted lips together over and over, measuring how much force and repetition the formula could take before it came off. The result went on sale in 1940 as Tru-Color, in six shades of red, and was promoted as the first smear-proof lipstick. Its overdrawn shape became the "Hunter's Bow," which pin-up artists copied for the rest of the decade.
The kissing machine looks like a novelty, and it ended up in a museum as one. It was also a declaration of method. The father worked by eye. He applied makeup personally to Mabel Normand, Gloria Swanson, Mary Pickford, Pola Negri, Jean Harlow, Claudette Colbert, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Lucille Ball, and Judy Garland, and gave Clara Bow her heart-shaped lips and Crawford her exaggerated mouth so that she would not look like all the other Bow imitators. In 1932 he built a Beauty Calibrator, a metal cage of bands that measured facial structure to a hundredth of an inch. According to his company, he claimed he never found perfection. The calibrator was a tool for one artist reading one face at a time.
The son's machines were built to make products repeatable. Pan-Stik, launched to the trade in 1947 and to the public in 1948, took twenty-six months of development. Part of the testing involved coating models' legs with the formula and sitting them in the sun to see how the color shifted. The goal was a cream foundation in stick form that went on "as easily as lipstick," in under twenty seconds. When Frank was a boy, actors arrived on set at seven in the morning, and the father's shop opened at five-thirty so he could make them up. Pan-Stik put that two hours into a tube and made the woman herself the makeup artist.
The Second World War added work that had nothing to do with glamour. The company developed face-camouflage shades for the U.S. Marine Corps, the same science of fooling a lens applied this time to the human eye in a jungle. When the war ended, television presented the strangest problem yet. The more advanced black-and-white cameras adopted after the war transmitted their images in negative. The solution, developed in the 1940s by Max Factor, Jr., according to Cabinet magazine's history, was makeup that looked so unnatural in person that performers often refused to put it on, and looked natural only once the signal was reversed on the screen. It is hard to find a better description of the family business than that: a face designed to look correct only to the machine.
Color television followed, and the company developed Color TV Make-up, which became the industry standard until high definition. In 1959 the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences gave him a distinguished service medallion. He was the son of an Oscar winner and became a medalist of a newer medium, a small inheritance of its own.
Then there was the nose.
— Donald Factor, his son, to the Los Angeles Times, June 1996He gloried in being able to make a scent that women would love and that would make people love the women.
The obituaries agreed that he was one of the great "noses," with a palate for scent that perfumers spend careers trying to develop. The company released its first fragrance, Electrique, in 1955 and Primitif three years later. Perfume, his son said, was his primary passion. "If he was out at a club or a party," Donald Factor recalled, "he would know every scent the women were wearing." The Scribner encyclopedia also credits him with nonallergenic lipstick and waterproof mascara, and calls him known for "his sensitive nose." Of the five senses, smell is the one a camera cannot record. The man who spent his working life getting faces past lenses took his greatest private pleasure in the one thing a lens could never pick up.
The Lipstick War He Did Not Win
The good years after the war were shorter than the legend suggests.
Gross sales were $17,053,040 in 1946. By 1950 they had fallen to $14,437,389, and net income had dropped from $2,612,136 to $858,252, down by more than two-thirds in four years. After the wartime shortages ended, the industry overproduced and stores filled with competing products. Raw materials, containers, and labor all got more expensive. In October 1950 the company raised its American prices ten percent across the board and then found it could not raise them again, because the competition was too fierce.
The main source of that competition was television, and in particular television advertising. Revlon, founded in 1932 by Charles Revson, a former nail-polish salesman who understood that women bought color the way they bought clothes, seasonally and on impulse, spent heavily on the new medium. Its share of the American lipstick market went from 15 to 28 percent by 1956. Coty's went from 3½ to 8. Max Factor's lipstick sales, from the company that had built the kissing machine and sold the first smear-proof formula, stayed around 1½ percent.
That number exposes the central weakness in the Factor model. Its authority came from the studio. Its credibility came from the claim that 96 percent of film studios used its products and that the stars wore them. That was a moat as long as movies were the main source of glamour. Television replaced movies as the main channel to American women, and it rewarded something different. It rewarded the company that could put the most pleasing image in front of the most people every night, and the professional's endorsement mattered less. The firm that made television's makeup lost television's advertising contest. Revlon did not have Pan-Cake, and it did not need it.
The company recovered. By 1955 gross profit was back up to $18,946,795, with net earnings of $2,418,324. It moved into more expensive TV advertising, built a new headquarters at 1655 North McCadden Place in 1956 next to the original Highland Avenue studio, and turned the older building over to automated manufacturing. That same year it took Sales Builders in-house as its American sales division. The outside distributor had held the national rights since 1927, and the company had bought it in 1946. Its absorption led to a full reorganization of American marketing, advertising, sales, and distribution. For the first time in nearly thirty years, the Factors controlled their own channel to the consumer.
The more important growth was happening overseas, almost unnoticed. A British agency had opened in 1927, and a British company followed in 1936. France came in 1937, Canada and the Philippines in 1940, and Mexico in 1944. After the war the pace increased: Australia, South Africa, Argentina, and Brazil in 1946, Ireland in 1947, Italy in 1948, Japan in 1953, and India in 1954. New factories followed in Toronto and in Pantin outside Paris in 1956, in Mexico City in 1958, and in Bournemouth, England, in 1959. In April 1953 Max Factor, Jr., and Milly were photographed arriving at Schiphol airport in Amsterdam, a modest man in a good coat whose name was on shop windows in Buenos Aires.
None of this impressed anyone at the time. It would prove to be the most important thing he did.
The Firm as a Family Portrait
On April 29, 1959, the Los Angeles City Council presented a resolution to Max Factor & Company to mark its fiftieth anniversary. A staff photographer from the Herald Express lined up three men holding the scroll: Councilman Earle D. Baker, Max Factor, Jr., president, and Max Firestein, executive vice president. At the jubilee party that year, Max Factor, Jr., was also photographed with Jayne Mansfield, Joi Lansing, and Arlene Howell. In those pictures he is short and dapper, with wavy hair and an engaging smile, smaller than the actresses around him and comfortable with that.
The company was a family firm in the full Old World sense, built on blood, marriage, and silent agreements about who did what. Davis, the older brother, chaired the board. Louis, the half-brother born in 1907 in the middle of the custody fight, was a vice president and assistant secretary. Sidney, born in 1916 to Jennie Cook, sat on the board. Then there was the in-law. Max Firestein was born in 1894 and came from Denver. He married Frank's sister Cecilia and worked his way up to chairman of the board's executive committee. Outside the company he was president of the Los Angeles Jewish Community Council and served on the national campaign cabinet of the United Jewish Appeal. Families like this one, Jewish families who had left the Pale of Settlement with a few hundred dollars, often produced a man like Firestein: the son-in-law who kept the books and the community commitments while the sons kept the trade.
The grandchildren came next. Firestein's sons Alfred, born in 1924, and Chester, born in 1930, rose to president and executive vice president. Frank's son Donald joined. So did Barbara Factor and Davis Factor Jr. In the early 1960s the company went public and listed Class A stock on the New York Stock Exchange, a step that turned the family firm into a public company even as it kept the family firm's habits. In 1965 Max Factor, Jr., launched Geminesse, a prestige line of makeup, skin care, and perfume sold only by uniformed clerks in department stores, in containers designed to look like Greek sculpture. It was the father's oldest instinct, putting the product on a pedestal and keeping it apart, revived by the son who had spent his career taking products off pedestals.
The structure was a portrait, and portraits fade. By the early 1970s Sidney had retired from the board, and Barbara, Donald, and Davis Jr. had left to pursue other interests. Davis Factor, now about seventy, was still chairman. Alfred Jay Firestein was president and chief executive. In 1973 the company agreed to merge with the Norton Simon conglomerate for about $500 million.
A few weeks later Alfred Firestein died suddenly at forty-eight.
Chester took his brother's place as president and lasted three years. On his watch the company expanded overseas and launched Musk for Men and UltraLucent waterproof makeup. In 1975 it launched the Halston fragrance, which became the world's second best-selling designer scent behind only Chanel No. 5. He resigned in 1976 to pursue personal interests and was succeeded by someone from outside the family. Max Factor, Jr., left the same year. Sixty-seven years after a man with four hundred dollars opened a hair store on South Central Avenue, no member of the founder's immediate family worked for Max Factor & Company.
What the Buyers Bought
The name went on without him.
Under Norton Simon the company launched Maxi, a cheaper line for teenagers with lip gloss, color rubs, and "mood" lipsticks, priced to compete with Bonne Bell and CoverGirl. Neither Maxi nor Geminesse nor the core line stopped profits and market share from falling. In 1983 Esmark acquired Norton Simon. A year later Esmark merged with Beatrice Foods, which put Max Factor into its Playtex beauty division and moved the headquarters from Los Angeles to Stamford, Connecticut. The company that existed because it was close to the soundstages now had its offices beside an interstate in Fairfield County, near a bra and a tampon.
In 1986 Ronald Perelman's Revlon bought the Playtex beauty division for $500 million, the same figure the Factors had received in 1973 for the entire company. So Max Factor ended up owned by the same company that had beaten it in the lipstick war of the 1950s. In April 1991 Revlon, carrying more than $3 billion in bank debt and junk bonds, sold Max Factor and its German subsidiary Betrix to Procter & Gamble for $1.14 billion. The Los Angeles Times described the deal as "combining the smell of greasepaint and the color of money." Max Factor was by then a $600 million business. More than 80 percent of the combined sales of Max Factor and Betrix came from outside the United States.
One Morgan Stanley analyst explained what P&G was really getting: "a dominant position in Japan and a big position in Europe." Part of the Japanese position was a skin-care brand called SK-II. Its history traces back to 1980, when the Japanese subsidiary acquired an antioxidant made from sake fermentation, called Pitera, and introduced it as Max Factor Secret Key with Pitera. The subsidiary went back to the branch Max Factor, Jr., opened in Japan in 1953, the year he flew into Schiphol and the year before the FBI jailed the man who had threatened his family. The Los Angeles Times in 1991 described SK-II as a "leading skin treatment brand in the Far East." It became one of the main reasons the deal made sense.
Procter & Gamble then shut the Max Factor Museum in the old Highland Avenue studio and donated hundreds of boxes of its contents to the Hollywood Entertainment Museum. By the first quarter of 2010 it had discontinued Max Factor in the United States altogether in order to concentrate on CoverGirl. The brand that had taught American women the word make-up disappeared from American drugstores while it kept selling in London, Sydney, and Tokyo. In 2015 Coty bought it from P&G along with a group of other beauty brands in a $12 billion deal. In 2018 Coty relaunched it with a stated emphasis on diversity. This was a company whose founder had once mixed 600 gallons of light olive greasepaint so that American extras in Ben-Hur would match the Italians filmed in Italy, and had created a shade called Light Egyptian for Lena Horne. It has always been in the business of skin color, honestly or otherwise.
Davis Factor died on August 31, 1991, a few months after Revlon sold the family name to a soap company in Cincinnati. Louis had died in December 1975. Sidney lived until 2005. Frank outlived all of them except Sidney.
A Quiet Man in a Loud Town
The adjectives the record uses for him are not ones Hollywood usually attaches to its successes. Quiet. Modest. Of great kindness.
He stayed married to Milly from the Ambassador Hotel in 1933 until her death, which the sources place in 1969 or in 1970. One source says thirty-seven years, which would make it 1970. The Scribner encyclopedia notes that the marriage was "something of a feat in Hollywood circles." They raced Thoroughbred horses together for years, which is how Elizabeth Arden and Jock Whitney had spent their afternoons when they were trying to beat him to Technicolor. He had a house in the Deep Well neighborhood of Palm Springs. Every summer he gave parties at his cabana at the Beverly Hills Hotel. His name is on buildings at Cedars-Sinai and at UCLA. After the company was sold, he spent his time on charity, especially Cedars-Sinai and the Devereux Foundation in Santa Barbara, which serves people with mental disabilities.
One detail recurs in the tributes, reported in the encyclopedia's account and drawn from what family and friends told Mary Tannen of the New York Times Magazine after his death. He was known for remembering the names of the people who waited on him in restaurants. A man with a famous name made a point of knowing the unfamous ones. It is the kind of habit a person might develop after spending his early years as an extra guarding the wigs, paid to be present and not to be seen.
He died of congestive heart failure on Friday night, June 7, 1996, at his home in West Los Angeles. He was ninety-one. The announcement came from Warren Cowan, a publicist, which is fitting for a man whose name was itself a kind of press release. The family asked that donations go to Devereux instead of flowers. He was buried at Hillside Memorial Park in Culver City, where his father's remains had also been moved years earlier from the Beth Olam mausoleum at Hollywood Cemetery. There are two Max Factors there, in the same ground.
— Maurice Stein, entertainment-industry cosmetics supplier, to the Los Angeles Times, June 1996Max Factor was probably the man most responsible for the image of makeup. That goes for the so-called 'housewife' of the '50s to the professional woman of the '90s. What was created by him on the screen became the look one decade at a time for the general public.
Read carefully, Maurice Stein's tribute shows the same confusion that runs through the whole story. Max Factor was probably the man most responsible. Which Max Factor? The housewife of the 1950s was wearing the son's Pan-Stik and the son's Tru-Color. The professional woman of the 1990s was wearing whatever Procter & Gamble's chemists put under the son's borrowed signature. Stein was talking about the son. Most of the people who read the obituary the next morning would have assumed he meant the father. The name was doing what it had been changed to do.
The Los Angeles Times reported that the Max Factor Beauty Museum was scheduled to close the weekend after he died. Its collection included toupees worn by John Wayne and Fred Astaire, the Beauty Calibrator in its cage of metal bands, and the rubberized kissing machine. The newspaper also went to a beauty supply store in North Hollywood and talked to the owner, Naimie Ojeil, who was still selling Pan-Stik almost half a century after a laboratory on Highland Avenue first put cream foundation in a twist-up tube. "It's as good as anything made now," Ojeil said. He mentioned the Pan-Cake and the special-effects products, and said you could talk about them for days.
Then he said, "He will not be replaced."
On the shelf behind the counter, in a case designed to go on in under twenty seconds, was the stick, and on it was the name.
Part IIThe Playbook
The useful lessons in Frank Factor's career are not the ones on the company's heritage page. That page tells a story of glamour made available to everyone. The operational story is less romantic and more useful. It concerns how a second-generation operator turned one artisan's reputation into a repeatable system, where that system worked, where it broke, and how to tell which parts of an inheritance are assets and which are only the founder's habits. The principles below come from the evidence in Part I. Some come from what he did well. A few come from what the record shows went wrong, including things that went wrong after he had left.
The principles
- 1.Solve the medium's problem, not the customer's request.
- 2.Treat theft as market research.
- 3.Rename the category to change who is allowed to buy it.
- 4.Build the test rig before you trust the product.
- 5.Let one insult end a dependency — then own the channel.
- 6.Trade publicity for publicity, at a dollar.
- 7.Inherit the name, not the instincts.
- 8.A professional moat is not a consumer moat.
- 9.Plant foreign flags while no one is watching.
- 10.Divide a family firm by temperament, then plan for the portrait to fade.
- 11.Keep one sense the machine cannot measure.
- 12.Audit your own origin story before someone with a manifest does.
Principle 1
Solve the medium's problem, not the customer's request
Nearly every important Max Factor product began as a response to a change in someone else's technology. Orthochromatic film gave way to panchromatic. Carbon arcs gave way to tungsten. Three-strip Technicolor needed brighter light that turned greasepaint into a mirror. Postwar television cameras transmitted in negative. Color television followed, and later high definition. None of the actresses asked for any of these products. What they asked for was not to look red, or green, or blotchy, and some of them simply refused to appear in color films. The real customer was the camera, and the Factors' advantage was that they studied the camera more closely than anyone else in the industry.
That focus is why their products set standards and did not merely compete. Pan-Cake became the standard makeup for all Technicolor films. Color TV Make-up became the broadcast standard until high definition. Once you have solved the medium's problem, every person who uses that medium inherits your solution. The black-and-white television makeup shows the principle at its most extreme: it looked so wrong in person that performers refused to wear it, and it was right only on the screen. Frank was willing to make something the human customer disliked because the machine in between preferred it.
Tactic: List the technology transitions underway in the platforms your customers depend on, and assign someone to build for the platform's new constraints before customers are able to say what is bothering them.
Principle 2
Treat theft as market research
The most useful signal in Frank Factor's career was a crime. Women on studio sets were stealing Pan-Cake and wearing it home. His father read this as a supply problem, a professional product disappearing, and wanted to keep it for film. Frank read it as demand for a consumer product that did not exist yet. He then dealt with the product's actual shortcoming, which was that it looked too dark outside studio lighting, by developing lighter shades.
The distinction matters. Theft told him that people wanted the product. It did not tell him the product was ready. The stolen version only worked under the lights it was designed for, and he had to adapt it to ordinary rooms. Production capacity was the other constraint, and he waited for it instead of launching a product he could not keep in stock. Then he used two film releases, months apart, as the launch platform, so the studio association that had caused the theft also served as the advertising. The result was the fastest-selling single makeup item to that date.
Tactic: Find out where professionals or employees are informally carrying your tools into their personal lives, then fix the one specification that limits the tool outside the professional setting before you launch a consumer version.
Principle 3
Rename the category to change who is allowed to buy it
In 1920 a teenage Frank Factor won an argument about one word. Cosmetics was respectable and limited. Make-up belonged to actors and to women who were not received in polite homes. Choosing the word with the worse reputation looks backward until you see what it did. It did not try to soften the stigma. It turned the stigma into an attraction. Ordinary women were invited to buy a bit of the theater, and the "Society Make-up" line put respectability and the dressing room side by side.
The broader lesson is that a category name decides who believes they have permission to buy. The Factors had deep professional credibility. The name change let ordinary consumers draw on that credibility without having to pretend to be professionals. The noun outlasted the family, the company's independence, and the brand's place in American stores. Anyone who has bought "make-up" has used the word Frank pushed for.
Tactic: Write down the word your industry uses for your product, then test whether a word your customers' aspirational peers use would give a new group of buyers permission to purchase.
Principle 4
Build the test rig before you trust the product
The kissing machine, a pair of rubber lips pressed together under about twenty pounds of tension, gets laughs on museum tours. It deserves more respect. Frank built it because human testing was not consistent: people kiss differently, get tired, and describe results imprecisely. Before Tru-Color existed as a product, there was a way to measure it. Pan-Stik went through twenty-six months of development and testing that included models sitting in the sun with the formula on their legs so the team could watch the color change.
Compare this with the father's Beauty Calibrator. It was ingenious, but it was a tool for one artist examining one face. The son's rigs were built for scale. They let a consumer product perform the same way for a woman in Melbourne as for an actress on Stage 6. They also produced something marketable: "smear-proof" and "as easily as lipstick, in under twenty seconds" are claims that a test rig makes believable.
⚗
The Factor Method: Problem, Rig, Product
How the laboratory turned technical constraints into consumer standards.
1914
Flexible greasepaint in 12 shades, thin enough not to crack when an actor smiled on camera.
1920
Frank persuades his father to adopt the word "make-up."
1926
Max and Frank develop waterproof theatrical makeup for Mare Nostrum.
1929
Panchromatic Make-up trademarked after six months of reformulation for new film stock and tungsten light.
1937
Pan-Cake, led by Frank over roughly two years, debuts in Vogues of 1938 and then goes to retail.
1940
Tru-Color lipstick, proved on a rubberized kissing machine, launches in six reds.
1948
Pan-Stik reaches the public after 26 months of development and sun tests on models' legs.
1954
Erace, the first retail concealer; color-television makeup becomes the broadcast standard.
1955
Electrique, the first fragrance, from a president known as one of the industry's great noses.
Tactic: Before your next product enters final development, spend a fixed share of the budget on a device or protocol that measures the one failure customers will notice first, and refuse to ship until the product passes it.
Principle 5
Let one insult end a dependency, then own the channel
In 1922 a receptionist at Leichner's German headquarters kept their largest worldwide retailer waiting. Max Factor walked out and cabled his sons to start selling the family's own greasepaint, which they had been making for years and had never marketed out of loyalty to the brands they distributed. The tube version soon led the market. The snub did not create the capability. It removed the hesitation that had kept them from using it.
The second half of the lesson took longer. National distribution began in 1927 through an outside company, Sales Builders, which held the rights for decades. The Factors bought it in 1946 and absorbed it as their own sales division in 1956, followed by a complete reorganization of marketing and distribution. That timing matters. The absorption came in the same years that Revlon was using television to take lipstick share. A company that does not control how it reaches the consumer cannot change that approach quickly when the market changes.
Tactic: Identify the capability you already have but are not selling because of a partner relationship, and set a written date by which you will either commercialize it or stop investing in it.
Principle 6
Trade publicity for publicity, at a dollar
The endorsement arrangement was elegant. Studios contracted their actresses to promote Max Factor for one dollar. In return, Max Factor's ads promoted the actresses' latest films. Neither party was really paying the other. Each was paying the other in attention. The studios regarded it as free advertising for their pictures. The Factors used it to build the "Cosmetics of the Stars" positioning and paired it with the claim, by 1933, that 96 percent of the world's film studios used their makeup.
This was a structural advantage that competitors without studio relationships could not copy. Elizabeth Arden had Jock Whitney's backing and a Technicolor connection on two films. The Factors had nearly every studio and nearly every star. Celebrity endorsements are easy to purchase. What the Factors had was harder to get: a professional relationship so deep that the endorsement was simply the visible part of it.
Tactic: Look for a partner whose marketing needs your distribution as much as you need their audience, and structure the deal so that each side's promotion is the other side's payment.
Principle 7
Inherit the name, not the instincts
The record is unusually specific about where father and son disagreed, and the son was usually right on commercial questions. That is the second-generation operator's opportunity: the founder's reputation without the founder's blind spots.
⇄
Two Theories of One Business
Where the founder and the successor diverged, according to the record.
| Question | Max Factor Sr. | Frank Factor / Max Factor Jr. |
|---|---|---|
| What do we call it? | "Cosmetics," the respectable word | "Make-up," the theatrical word, adopted in 1920 |
| Who is the market? | Satisfied to supply the film community | Pushed with his siblings for national scale |
| Pan-Cake retail? | Reserve it for the studios | Develop lighter shades and sell it to the public |
| Method | Personal application; the Beauty Calibrator for one face at a time | Test machines and protocols for repeatable mass products |
| Response to a slight | Walks out of Leichner and changes strategy by cable | Recorded as quiet, modest, remembers the waiters' names |
The name change in 1938 is the part people tend to underestimate. Frank could have kept his own name and built a reputation separate from his father's. He took the father's name instead, at his family's urging, and the transition became invisible to customers. Tributes in 1996 still blurred the two men, which was the point. He took on the brand's continuity and still made independent decisions about strategy. It is hard to do both, and he did.
Tactic: If you are succeeding a founder, keep the public identity continuous while privately listing the founder's three strongest instincts, and test each one against current evidence before you adopt it as your own.
Principle 8
A professional moat is not a consumer moat
The company's authority came from the studio, and in the 1950s the studio stopped being where glamour was decided. Gross sales fell from $17.05 million in 1946 to $14.44 million in 1950. Net income dropped by roughly two-thirds. Revlon nearly doubled its lipstick share, from 15 to 28 percent, mainly through television advertising, while Max Factor's share stayed around 1½ percent. The company that made the makeup television used lost the contest that television judged, which was advertising.
The lesson is subtle because the professional credibility remained real. Pan-Stik was still on a North Hollywood shelf in 1996, and the store's owner said it was as good as anything made then. The moat existed but defended against the wrong attackers. It protected the studio business against other studio suppliers. It did nothing against a competitor that went directly to consumers through a channel where a professional endorsement counted for little.
Tactic: Each year, ask which channel your end customers now use to decide what to buy, and if that channel is not the one where your expertise is recognized, move marketing budget into it before your share shows the change.
Principle 9
Plant foreign flags while no one is watching
The company's international expansion attracted far less attention than the Hollywood connection, and it ended up mattering more. Britain had an agency in 1927 and a company in 1936. France followed in 1937, Canada and the Philippines in 1940, Mexico in 1944. Then came Australia, South Africa, Argentina, and Brazil in 1946, Ireland in 1947, Italy in 1948, Japan in 1953, and India in 1954, with factories in Toronto, Pantin, Mexico City, and Bournemouth before 1960.
The payoff came decades later and went to others. When P&G bought Max Factor in 1991, more than 80 percent of combined sales were outside the United States, and the analyst's summary was "a dominant position in Japan." The Japanese subsidiary, descended from the 1953 branch, had produced SK-II. In 2010 P&G dropped Max Factor from the American market and kept it overseas. The international network Frank built outlasted the home market where the brand started.
⌛
The Afterlife of a Name
Ownership after the family, and what each transfer did to the brand.
| Year | Owner / Event | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| 1909–1973 | Factor family; NYSE listing in early 1960s | Family Product-led, Hollywood-anchored |
| 1973 | Merger with Norton Simon (~$500M) | Conglomerate Halston fragrance succeeds; share declines |
| 1984 | Esmark–Beatrice; folded into Playtex | Dislocation Headquarters leaves Los Angeles for Stamford |
| 1986 | Revlon buys Playtex beauty ($500M) | Rival Owned by the 1950s lipstick-war victor |
| 1991 | Procter & Gamble ($1.14B with Betrix) | Strategic Bought for Japan and Europe; museum shuttered |
| 2010 | P&G discontinues brand in U.S. | Retreat Survives only overseas |
| 2015–2018 | Coty acquires; relaunches | Revival Repositioned around diversity |
Tactic: Put one market outside your home country on a ten-year horizon, staff it locally, and protect its budget from the quarterly cuts your domestic business will request.
Principle 10
Divide a family firm by temperament, then plan for the portrait to fade
For decades the Factor firm assigned roles by temperament. Davis was the outward-facing manager and chairman. Frank ran the lab and later the presidency. Louis was in administration. Max Firestein, the son-in-law, ran the executive committee and represented the family in the community. Then the grandchildren arrived. It was a good arrangement, and that made it fragile. By the early 1970s the third generation had largely left, Sidney had retired, and the company was sold in 1973. Alfred Firestein died weeks later at forty-eight. Chester resigned in 1976, and Frank left the same year. Nobody from the founder's immediate family remained.
The structure worked until it no longer had people to fill it. The timing of the sale deserves credit. The family sold while the name was still worth $500 million and kept control of the decision. The deeper lesson is that a family firm usually lasts as long as the family wants to keep running it, and the third generation's departure is the warning sign. The Factors read it correctly and sold. Many families do not.
Tactic: Every five years, list by name which family members will hold operating roles in ten years, and if the list is shorter than the roles, begin a sale or professionalization process while you still control the timing.
Principle 11
Keep one sense the machine cannot measure
Frank built machines to test kissing, sun exposure, and the response of film stock and television cameras. His private specialty was smell, the one sense a camera cannot record. He was known as one of the great noses. His son said he could name every scent at a party, and the obituaries called perfume his primary passion. The company's fragrances, Electrique in 1955 and Primitif in 1958, and later Halston under the Norton Simon owners, came out of a business whose identity had been built entirely on what looked right on camera.
There is a useful tension here for leaders. A company built on instruments still needs someone whose judgment in one area cannot be reduced to an instrument, because some products succeed or fail on qualities no test captures. Frank combined both: rigorous testing for anything that could be measured and a trained personal sense for what could not.
Tactic: Identify the one product quality your metrics do not capture, put your best-calibrated person in charge of judging it, and give that person veto power over launches.
Principle 12
Audit your own origin story before someone with a manifest does
The family's official history, much of it through a former company PR man, included a court appointment, a secret marriage, an escape through frozen woods, and a lost fortune of nearly $40,000. The Moltke's manifest records $400 in steerage. One industry historian could find no evidence of the World's Fair swindle and doubts that the 1908 move to Los Angeles had anything to do with movies, since the first Hollywood production company did not open until 1911. Even the founder's birth year is disputed, 1872 versus 1877.
None of this hurt the brand much, because the brand sold transformation, and an embellished history fits that. The risk falls on everyone who later tries to learn from the company. If the record is unreliable, nobody can confidently say who did what. The Scribner encyclopedia concedes that "it is difficult to separate Factor's contributions from those of the rest of the family." In the 1990s the Associated Press credited the father with mass-producing Pan-Cake, while other accounts say the father opposed it. An operator who wants credit for real decisions needs a record that will hold up when someone checks the primary documents.
Tactic: Have someone outside the marketing team compare your company's founding story against primary documents, and publish the verified version before a journalist or historian does it for you.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Donald Factor, recalling his father, Los Angeles Times, June 1996If he was out at a club or a party, he would know every scent the women were wearing.
— Naimie Ojeil, North Hollywood beauty supply owner, on Pan-Stik, Los Angeles Times, June 1996It's as good as anything made now. And their Pan-Cake, their special effects products . . . you could talk about it for days. He will not be replaced.
— Max Factor brand credo, as published by the companyYou are not born glamorous. Glamour is created.
— Ellen Loughran, The Scribner Encyclopedia of American LivesAlthough it is difficult to separate Factor's contributions from those of the rest of the family, his innovations affected many women in the 1950s and 1960s.
Maxims
- The camera is the customer. Build for the constraints of the medium your users depend on, and the users will adopt whatever you build.
- Stolen goods are a demand signal. When professionals carry your tool home, fix its one limitation outside the workplace and sell it to everyone.
- Pick the word with the better story. The name of a category decides who feels entitled to buy from it.
- Measure before you claim. A rubber mouth under twenty pounds of tension is why "smear-proof" was believable.
- Use a slight to end a dependency. The capability you hold back for a partner's sake may be your best business.
- Own the route to the customer. A company that sells through someone else's channel cannot change direction quickly when the market does.
- Take the founder's name and question the founder's judgment. Keep the identity continuous and decide strategy from current evidence.
- Credibility with professionals does not guarantee consumer share. Expertise in the studio did not stop Revlon on television.
- Build abroad early. Branches opened quietly overseas can outlast the home market.
- Sell while the family still matters. When the third generation leaves, choose the timing of the exit yourself.
