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Elizabeth Arden has all this—and then some. She operates two remote Shangri-Las, also called Maine Chance, one in Maine and one near Phoenix, Ariz. (made more famous by Mamie Eisenhower's two-week stay last spring). At the Maine Chances, described by Elizabeth as "magic isles where cares and worries vanish," patrons not only get treatments for their face, figure and hair, but live an austere life that rules out fatty foods and liquor (if they are overweight), involves daily exercise and sports instruction. Cost: from $400 to $600 weekly, depending on accommodations.
Careful Guards. Both Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein abhor the other's ideas ("I don't go in for all that trash," says Miss Arden of one of her rival's favorite ingredients), but show a fondness for each other's personnel. Arden's raids on Rubinstein reached a climax in 1938, when she hired away Rubinstein's sales manager at a fancy salary. But Rubinstein struck back a year later by hiring as her vice president none other than Elizabeth Arden's ex-husband, Thomas J. Lewis, who had been general manager of Arden's wholesale empire. Presumably Elizabeth Arden's secrets went with him.
"I think this is the nastiest business in the world," says Elizabeth Arden.
"There are so many people in it, and they all just copy me." She is probably right—but there is nothing unusual about it. Each company carefully guards its new gimmicks and products, and a chemist from one firm having lunch with a chemist from another is sure to be suspect. But once a product is out, everyone grabs greedily for it. Bristol-Myers worked for nearly six years to research its Ban roll-on deodorant; after it appeared, it was copied by nearly a dozen firms.
Since it takes a hefty pot of gold to meet such competition, big companies are taking over what used to be an industry of small firms. The industry's biggest is Avon (1957 sales: a record $100,379,695), which sells its products door to door with the help of some 100,000 representatives. But the liveliest is fast-growing Revlon, run by aggressive Charles Revson, 51. Revson founded his company in 1932, built it up to a $95 million gross last year by advertising the elegance and glamorous names of his products, popularizing such ideas as matching lipstick and fingernail polish and a variety of shades. The undisputed sales genius of the industry, he colors it like a blob of his own fire-red nail polish, is as well known for chewing up admen and underlings as spitting out new ideas (TIME, Sept. 30). "I don't meet competition," he snaps. "I crush it." Says Elizabeth Arden: "I just don't like that man."