Chapter Nineteen

The Downward Spiral

IN LATE OCTOBER 1936, Flora Lasker left Chicago for an extended stay in New York City. Albert went off for a three-week fishing trip in Florida, planning to join his wife in New York in time for a speech he was scheduled to deliver to the American Association of Advertising Agents on November 19.¹

Flora was then in her late fifties, and had been an invalid, coping with varying degrees of disability, for three decades. Stout and sallow, she walked with difficulty. Visits to the mineral baths at Watkins Glen, New York, during the summer afforded her some respite and also gave her the chance to visit her family in Buffalo.² But she suffered from chronic headaches, often intense enough to send her to bed. In recent years, her son Edward later recalled, she had become obsessed with her own mortality: “She talked constantly about dying . . . If she ever got annoyed about Father, the conversation would never end without her saying, ‘Some day you will find me in bed after one of these headaches, and you will find me dead, and then you will realize.’”³

There were times when Albert was clearly impatient with his slow-moving wife, and other times when he paid very little attention to her. Because of her physical challenges, and perhaps because she felt outshone, she didn’t enjoy socializing as much as her husband. “She was dull, compared to him,” David Sarnoff observed.⁴

Flora—like so many others—found her husband a challenge. Albert was exhausting, demanding, and difficult—and also endlessly interesting and energizing. Ralph Sollitt, who knew the family as well as any outsider, spoke to the contrasts between Albert and Flora, and the tensions that resulted:

He was aggressive and hard-headed, wanted his house to be 42nd Street and 5th Avenue all the time, from nine o’clock in the morning until midnight, and Mrs. Lasker would have been very delighted to have seen her husband every day and perhaps one other person perhaps every six months . . . She was borne along a little unwillingly on all this Hip Hooray and excitement.

The last years of her life she got to be better physically than she [had been], and I felt that . . . she came to have a tolerance for the exuberance that she felt was quite unnecessary. He had all these animal spirits all the time, and she thought it would be so much better for him and everybody else if he could tone himself down. [But] I had a feeling in the last seven or eight years that she came to see that maybe Albert Lasker wouldn’t be nearly so interesting to her, if he didn’t have all that.⁵

Lasker’s eye may have wandered during the course of his marriage. Edward wrote in his own unpublished memoir that while his father had assured him that he had never been unfaithful to Flora, “I do not take his words too seriously.”⁶ But through it all, Flora exerted a profound influence over Albert. She was his central point of reference—a stabilizing force. Introspective, conservative, and even from her limited vantage point an acute observer of the world, she provided a strong counterpoint to her husband’s own life narrative. “He couldn’t get disconnected from her,” Sarnoff said. “He had to have an anchor.”

On their last night together in Chicago, at the Burton Place mansion, Albert and Flora shared a tender moment. Over the previous several months, Flora had lost a considerable amount of weight, and Albert was proud of her accomplishment. She remained a near-invalid, however; she couldn’t walk up a flight of stairs without exhausting herself. Couches had been strategically located on the stair landings so that she could rest and catch her breath, and it was on one of those couches, with Albert attending her, that she made an unusual observation: “You know, we have reached the loveliest time of our married life. All the early, hectic, romantic love is over, and in its place has come a deep and abiding friendship. We love each other not only for our virtues, [but also for] our faults, and we won’t change a single virtue or surrender a single fault because then it would be something else.”⁷

The Laskers maintained a suite of rooms at the Ritz for their frequent visits to New York. As soon as Flora arrived for her stay in the fall of 1936, friends and members of the extended family began visiting with her. Edward, then living in Greenwich, Connecticut, and working in Lord & Thomas’s New York office, stopped by after work; Albert stayed there when he arrived from Florida. Daughter Mary lived in Chicago, but Francie was at nearby Vassar College and made plans to travel down to New York on December 19 to join her family.

On the evening of December 17—a Thursday night—Flora, Albert, and Edward sat talking quietly at the Ritz. Flora was in her element. “Nothing made her as happy,” Edward later commented, “as to be alone with the members of her family, and talking about each other.” The conversation meandered, eventually settling on the subject of Albert. “You can’t convince me,” Flora said at one point, “that you’re not the most wonderful man in the world.” Albert, embarrassed, told her that she shouldn’t say things like that in front of other people—even their own son. After Edward left for the evening, Albert returned to the subject. She shouldn’t embarrass him with such grand and sweeping compliments, he insisted.

But Flora held her ground: “I know all your failings, your weaknesses. You are insufferably egotistical on the things you know nothing about, and you are painfully modest about those things about which you know everything.” She told her husband that she loved him more than anything or anyone in the world—even more than her children. “You’re a wicked woman,” a startled Albert replied. “I know,” Flora persisted. “I love you more.”

The next day was a busy one for Albert, since for the first time, all Lord & Thomas employees making less than $5,000 a year received a surprise Christmas bonus of a half-month’s salary. The agency had experimented briefly with bonuses in the 1920s; now—perhaps influenced by the California chain store campaign’s successful conclusion a month earlier, which focused in part on creating satisfied employees—Lasker decided to revive the tradition. Most likely the bonus was a topic of discussion at the Ritz that night, as Flora and Albert’s suite filled up with guests for an impromptu Friday night soirée. But Flora wasn’t feeling well, and she soon excused herself.

On Saturday, Francie arrived, which gave Flora new cause to celebrate. It was to be their last day in New York; tomorrow, the family would decamp for Chicago. (There a surprise awaited Flora: a new $16,000 Lincoln that Albert had had specially modified for her.) But by midday, Flora was complaining of pain in her arms and sweating profusely. “You know,” she told Edward, “it is the same way that Blanche Mandel felt just before she died.” Edward, annoyed, assured his mother that she wasn’t dying. They talked quietly in her bedroom as Albert and Pittsburgh newspaper magnate Paul Block—an old family friend—conversed in the adjoining sitting room. When Block eventually rose to leave, Edward offered to accompany him to the elevator. Some fifty feet down the hallway, he suddenly heard his father crying out his name. He rushed back to the suite and into his mother’s bedroom: “Mother was lying there, breathing in a very loud and unnatural way, and I was sure what had happened to her—that she had a stroke—and the maid was being hysterical, and Father was being hysterical, too, saying, ‘Do something! Do something!’”

By the time a doctor could be located, Flora was dead of a cerebral thrombosis. The thirty-four-year partnership between Albert and Flora Lasker was over.

According to his biographer, Albert was rendered “completely distraught” by Flora’s death. Recuperating with his daughter Mary and son-in-law Gerald Foreman at the Miami Beach estate, he kept Mary awake all night with professions of his undying love for Flora. He obsessed about his shortcomings, as loss and guilt became inextricably bound up in his mind.

Slowly, in the early months of 1937, Albert began patching his life back together. He played poker with the Partridges at Burton Place. He threw elaborate parties at Mill Road Farm, including a June 1937 dinner for 107 guests. Honors came his way: lunch at the White House, membership on the University of Chicago’s board of trustees, and others. These distractions were necessary, but insufficient.

Flora left an estate of just over $2.3 million, which after taxes amounted to some $1.4 million. Albert received about half of that amount, with Edward, Mary, and Francie each getting just over $200,000, and the remaining $95,000 going to other family members.⁸ The estate was settled almost exactly a year to the day after Flora’s death—a coincidence that certainly didn’t escape Albert’s attention, even though when that unhappy anniversary arrived, he was on the other side of the world.

In the summer of 1937, Albert Lasker took an uncharacteristic step. Finally acceding to a request that Flora had made many times over the years, and ignoring the objections of at least one of his children, he decided to produce an autobiography.⁹

Lasker chose not to write the book himself. His work and family obligations would have made that difficult; his unsettled emotional state also would have interfered. Hiring a ghostwriter, as so many business moguls before him had done, was the natural solution. He settled upon a journeyman writer named Boyden Sparkes, who had been a war correspondent for the New York Tribune, had written books for or about several “business celebrities,” and had close ties to the editors at the Saturday Evening Post, for which he had written inspirational first-person accounts such as White Sox star Eddie Collins’s “From Player to Pilot.”¹⁰ Walter Chrysler’s autobiography, as told to Boyden Sparkes, was serialized in the Post in the summer of 1937 and helped bring Sparkes to Lasker’s attention.

Lasker and Sparkes settled on a fee of $30,000. But perhaps owing to his distracted state of mind, Lasker failed to define an audience for the project. “I want this book for a circulation of three,” Lasker told Sparkes at an early meeting. “Three children, each a copy. That means more to me than all the other circulating, and it is the only purpose of the book.”¹¹ At other points in their conversations, however, Lasker said that the purpose of the book was “to show how to sell,” or to explain to readers what kills great companies (their goods becoming commodities, or their owners getting greedy and trying to grow too fast), or to underscore the perils of governmental bureaucracy.

The most grandiose of these schemes held the most appeal for the ambitious Sparkes, who—in addition to getting mixed messages from Lasker—also engaged in some selective hearing. Lasker had been thinking out loud about a sweeping plan to remake the American economy, and it was those visions, rather than a “circulation of three,” that Sparkes latched on to.

The project officially began on September 14, 1937, when Sparkes traveled with Lasker aboard the Union Pacific’s Forty-Niner, a streamliner that ran five times a month from Chicago to San Francisco. Sparkes brought along a stenographer to record the conversations. It must have been a striking scene: Lasker striding around the plush railroad car for hours at a time, gesturing animatedly, punctuating his sentences with his characteristic rapid-fire interjections—You see? Do you see? D’you see? Do I make myself clear?—while Sparkes tried to extract from the fire-hose flow of Lasker’s hyperactive brain the building blocks of a coherent story. In the corner, a harried stenographer struggled to keep up.

Lasker enjoyed the process. When the Forty-Niner reached San Francisco, he invited Sparkes and the stenographer to continue on with him to Honolulu aboard the S.S. Lurline. What Sparkes extracted from his subject during those two weeks was a sprawling jumble of anecdotes, insight, emotion, exaggeration, tantalizing leads, red herrings, and dead-ends. “My father [alone] is going to take all morning,” Lasker enthused in their opening session aboard the Forty-Niner. Then his mind raced off to the Leo Frank case, then to a movie (They Won’t Forget) that he had just seen, and then to his own policy against self-promotion:

All my life long I felt it was a mistake, I have made up my mind to be in the background of other things, while I was making people and things known. And there is a great reason for that: You can have much more power to make people and things known if you are unknown yourself . . . If you are going to work, and willing to think, and you are nobody, a lot of people will let you do a lot of things they won’t if they think you are somebody. Do I make myself clear?¹²

“Quite,” was all Sparkes could muster in response.

It must have been a relief for Sparkes to say goodbye to Lasker on the docks of Honolulu and go back east as his hyperactive client plunged into his tour of Hawaii. Sparkes had a suitcase full of gold—Lasker’s first round of reminiscences—and a list of contacts to follow up on while his employer circumnavigated the globe. Lasker’s candor and magnetism, and the wonderful yarns that he spun—touching an incredible range of subjects, and spanning eras of change and turbulence—probably sent Sparkes home to North Carolina convinced that he had stumbled upon a plum assignment.

Where was Albert Lasker headed, in that unsettled fall of 1937?

The plan, conceived by Albert Lasker’s golfing buddy Gene Sarazen—winner of thirty-nine PGA tournaments, and one of only five “Grand Slam” winners in all of golf history—was to get Lasker’s mind off Flora’s death by sending him on an extended tour around the world in 1937, starting in Hawaii. Of course he would not go alone. The party that ultimately was put together included Lasker, Sarazen and his wife Mary, Flora’s maid, Francie Lasker, and a friend of Francie’s. Their itinerary included stops in Japan, Manchuria, the Philippines, Bali, Java, Singapore, Cambodia, India, Egypt, Italy, France, and England, with the Sarazens leaving the tour after Singapore.

This was not a typical tour group, including as it did an extremely well-connected businessman and a world-famous golf celebrity. Everywhere they went, they were treated like very important people—even royalty. Old friends, like Lasker’s Washington-era buddy Cal O’Laughlin, Standard Oil’s Walter Teagle, and newspaper magnate Roy Howard (owner of the Scripps-Howard chain), called ahead to get doors opened, and dinners and cocktail parties in their honor took up many of the evenings over the course of the six-month sojourn. General Motors, grateful for Lord & Thomas’s skilled management of the Frigidaire account, had a luxury limousine waiting for them at almost every stop. Traveling for a month in India, Lasker and his entourage enjoyed the use of a private rail car.

Hawaii, their first stop, set the tone, as Lasker recounted in a letter to the card-playing Partridges back in Chicago:

We have been taken in hand by a very good friend of the Sarazens—Mr. Francis Brown. He is one of the wealthiest men on the Island and, I gather, by far the most popular. He has about fifteen different homes on the different islands—all of which are constantly staffed but many of which he doesn’t go to for years at a time. He in turn has arranged that his many friends entertain us in their homes, most of which are feudal estates, so we are really getting a picture of the Islands as seen by few people . . .

The Japanese Premier is one of Mr. Brown’s most intimate friends and he has cabled him of our coming and asking him to extend us any courtesies . . .¹³

After spending two weeks in baronial splendor in Hawaii, the group sailed westward to Yokohama. For decades, Lasker had been eager to visit Japan, and now the moment had arrived. Joseph Grew, U.S. ambassador to Japan, took the opportunity to golf with Sarazen, who was a cult figure in Japan. At one public event, some eight thousand people turned out in a drenching rain to watch Sarazen play an exhibition round.

Lasker, recovering from a torn ligament in his leg, skipped this outing. But his interests lay elsewhere, in any case. He viewed his voyage as an opportunity to meet with potentates and pundits around the world and try to get a sense of where global politics and economics were headed. In the fall of 1937—with war clouds gathering in Europe and Asia—that was no easy task. Relations between Japan and the United States were chilly, with murky subcurrents. As one observer wrote in the wake of Lasker’s stop in Tokyo:

He enjoyed very much the Foreign Office spokesmen’s conference and got a great kick out of it. After the conference we got together such men as Naghi of Tass, Cox of Reuter, and Fabius, the Dutch journalist. . . . I think the two hours he had with them gave him all kinds of conflicting opinions. When it was over he said he never in his life had been so confused, and thought he had better give up trying to find out what is going on here.¹⁴

In Bali, as the first anniversary of Flora’s death approached, Lasker contracted a tropical disease—perhaps dengue fever. His temperature soared well above 100 degrees, where it remained for several days, causing him to sweat profusely and lose eleven pounds in less than a week. A local doctor concluded that he was suffering from malaria. Lasker, partly delirious, demanded that a different doctor and two nurses be flown in from nearby Java to attend to him (an extravagance that cost him $2,500).

While in India, Lasker had a chance encounter with John Gunther, journalist and author of Inside Europe (1936). Gunther was conducting research in Asia for the second in his series of nine highly successful “inside” books, which surveyed the world continent by continent. Ten years younger than Lasker, Gunther had grown up in Cincinnati and Chicago, attended the University of Chicago—of which Lasker was now a trustee—and knew Lasker by reputation. Remembered today mainly for his compelling account of his son’s death from a brain tumor (Death Be Not Proud, 1949), Gunther was hired by the Lasker family after Albert’s death to write his authorized biography.

From South Asia, the Lasker party made their way to Southern Europe. Here, as elsewhere, Lasker kept his sharp eye trained on social, political, and economic trends. In Italy, he saw Mussolini’s fascist regime up close and despised what he saw. He witnessed firsthand a resurgent anti-Semitism and foresaw the coming global war:

Here in Europe, the jitters that they have been feeling for the past several months are quieted for the moment, but to my notion, only quieted. When things are not in turmoil here, it is only because of momentary exhaustion, everyone is giving everyone else a breathing spell. However, it is pleasant to feel that the dynamite fuse is not likely to go off at the moment. For the longer pull, I still feel that war is in the making in Europe, and I hope I am wrong, but I know I am not.¹⁵

The party’s last stop was England, where Albert had a busy schedule, including appointments in London with Sir Josiah Stamp: chairman of the London, Midland and Scottish Railway and one of the richest men in England. Stamp explained how he worked with his unions to run his railroad and told Lasker that the United States was two or three decades behind Europe when it came to labor relations. Reflecting on this conversation and others, Lasker realized that he, too, was an “employer” of consequence—not through Lord & Thomas, but through the boards of the companies he sat on.

He had spent half a year educating himself on the state of the world and the responsibilities of employers, and now he was headed home. He had a vision about how the world of work could be made more humane, and more efficient. What if he could make his newfound awareness—in his word—“contagious”?

The details of his plan mostly have to be inferred.¹⁶ Lasker evidently believed that the strategy that had rescued the California chain store operators—first winning over their own workforce, then bringing in natural external allies such as the peach growers, and finally wooing the public at large—could be applied on a grand scale. Like the chain stores, American capitalism was under attack, and (as Lasker saw it) deservedly so. Only by applying the “velvet touch” across the entire economy could capitalism be rescued from itself.

Equally important, capitalism would be saved from the Democrats, Franklin Roosevelt, and the New Deal. Lasker had met Roosevelt at the White House in the summer of 1937. Although they talked at great length about anti-Semitism and about the state of the American railroads, Lasker—who had no idea why he had been summoned to this private lunch with the president—came away mystified and unimpressed.

Now, not quite a year later, brimming over with impressions from his conversations around the world, his negative opinions about the New Deal had softened somewhat. “I think we would have been through a terrible ferment if there had been no Roosevelt.” The New Deal was objectionable not because it was evil, but because it was fundamentally bureaucratic, went too far, and moved too fast.

As Lasker saw it, the time had come for the business community to solve its own problems by rebuilding its foundations. A first and necessary step would be the creation of national labor unions on the European model. A second would be the public embrace by business of federal regulations on wages and hours. Other substantive and symbolic acts would follow, all with an eye toward reshaping the national economic and political debate. “Public relations is the art of private relations,” Lasker declared to Sparkes: “In [business leaders’] relations to themselves, they had better position themselves to meet the demands of the day, or they won’t have any proper public relations. And I honestly think if they would, the public relations would pretty soon take care of itself. If the people really felt that there was sympathetic leadership, the people would force the politicians to give recognition of that.” In other words, business would mend its fences with its various publics. Once that was accomplished, politicians would feel compelled to make sweeping and appropriate changes to the American economy and society.

The scheme was inextricably bound up in Lasker’s conception of himself, his stage of life—in his late fifties, recently widowed, and wealthy—and his recurring sense of superficiality and insubstantiality. The grandiosity of the plan, aimed at fundamentally transforming American society, also reflected Lasker’s deepening emotional distress.

Upon his return to the United States, Lasker arranged a meeting with Roy Howard and told him of the plan. Howard provided Lasker with letters of introduction to as many as a hundred business leaders, and in the spring of 1938, Lasker set up a series of one-on-one talks with many of those leaders, beginning in Chicago and fanning outward. “Mr. Albert D. Lasker . . . has had a couple of talks with me on a matter in which he is very much interested and has interested me, and to which he has evinced a willingness to devote his time and money,” wrote Joseph P. Kennedy to New York banker Thomas W. Lamont in May. “I don’t know whether it is anything in which you might be interested, but I told him I would talk it over with you.”¹⁷

Lasker also tried to proselytize on a grander scale. In a rambling conversation with Sparkes, he made reference to a recent meeting in New York—one of a half-dozen such meetings—that included rival advertising magnate (and former Lord & Thomas employee) Bruce Barton, the executive chairman of DuPont, the president of Johns Manville, the senior vice president in charge of labor relations of Standard Oil of New Jersey, a long-time labor-relations expert from the Rockefeller empire, and movie czar Will Hays. Lasker lectured his audience on their opportunities and obligations as business leaders and molders of public opinion. “When I left the room,” he recalled, “I heard Bruce say, ‘That was the ablest explanation and exploration of the situation in which American business finds itself I have ever heard,’ and the other men concurred that they had heard it many times, but the situation had never been made so clear to them.”

But that meeting, like Lasker’s larger campaign, led only to disappointment. “I had failed,” he admitted to his ghostwriter, “because I hadn’t inspired them to action.” Once again, he had been reduced to the role of mere propagandist, and he found that bitterly disappointing:

I had been so many years with these business leaders that I know how to approach them. I know how to present it, put on an act, not to make an impression but to get them to appraise their situation. But if the purpose to which I had dedicated myself has failed—to get them to do something about it—so to me the thing was a complete failure, and far from being inspired or complimented by what Barton said, I knew somewhere down the line I was lacking at the moment of opportunity, because there certainly is opportunity for someone to be a leader here.

Now, if I had the strength in me, they would follow me. Then I realized what it was. I have been too superficial all my life. I could propagandize them on what was the matter, but I didn’t have the strength to take it apart and make them see what was to be done . . . I wasn’t a big man.

Albert Lasker usually cared little about his stature. But by the spring of 1938, he was fragile and rudderless, and the perception that he “wasn’t a big man” was an outsized blow. He saw himself as a weak and small man, unable to justify his existence.

In July, Lasker announced abruptly that he was moving the headquarters of Lord & Thomas from Chicago to New York, effective immediately, and that he would be retiring from the presidency of Lord & Thomas as of October 1.

To understand the significance of these proposed changes, we need to visit Albert Lasker on a typical day in that tumultuous spring of 1938.¹⁸ The setting is the Palmolive Building, at 919 North Michigan Avenue in Chicago—later the headquarters of Playboy magazine, and today a luxury condominium complex.

Lasker’s office and conference room were separated from the rest of Lord & Thomas’s offices on the eighteenth floor by a hallway and a reception room, with a checkerboard flooring of antique Italian tile that Lasker had picked up on one of his European trips.¹⁹ A visitor had to pass through three sets of doors to get to the inner sanctum. “Lasker walked through these like a man in a trance,” his biographer observed, “as if he were totally oblivious of the barriers.”²⁰ But Lasker’s visitors were acutely aware of these barriers.

Every day, before Lasker arrived, a secretary checked and adjusted his desk clock. (It tended to lose about two minutes a day.) She filled his fountain pens with ink, and sharpened and put in the tray on his desk a specific array of colored pencils: three green, three brown, and one yellow. She then copied parts of Lasker’s “work sheet” from the day before onto a clean sheet of white paper. (Uncompleted tasks were rolled forward day by day until they were completed and crossed off the work sheet.) Appointments for the day were typed out on a piece of small notepaper, a copy of which was also given to Lasker’s chauffeur when he arrived in the office. The little green book on his desk was checked for impending birthdays or anniversaries, reminders of which were typed up several days in advance—and left there until Lasker either acted on the reminder or threw it away.

The schedule and the day’s mail were placed in a manila folder positioned every day on the same spot on Lasker’s desk. The most important correspondence went on top. Letters written in illegible longhand were typed before being put in the folder for his review. Letters written in German were translated. Letters asking for money were culled unless the correspondent showed up in Lasker’s address book as a personal friend. A report on the daily sales figures for Kotex and Kleenex were also included in this folder, as were daily newspaper columns by Walter Lippman, Dorothy Thompson, and Mark Sullivan.

A white memo pad was positioned next to the desk blotter. The cigarette box on the desk was topped off—always with George Washington Hill’s Lucky Strikes—and matches placed nearby. The humidor was stocked with boxes of Antonio y Cleopatra Claras ($13.80 per hundred, purchased at the newsstand in the lobby). Everything was in place for the master’s arrival.

That generally happened around 9:00 a.m., although punctuality was not one of Lasker’s strong suits. One of the first things he did upon arrival was to sit for a shave in the barber’s chair in the washroom that adjoined his office. While he was being attended to by George Andrews, who had been his barber for a quarter-century, he was not to be disturbed, unless for a long-distance call or a call he had already said that he wanted to take. In those cases, a secretary ventured into the impromptu barbershop, announced who was on the line, and gave Lasker the opportunity to take the call. On rare occasions, senior Lord & Thomas managers would approach the open doorway and make quick reports. (“That is one of the best chances to talk to him,” confided Los Angeles office head Don Francisco, “because he can’t talk back.”²¹) Meanwhile, the office staff was placing the flowers that his chauffeur brought in from the Mill Farm Road estate in vases—fresh water daily—set in prominent places, including the conference room’s fourteen-foot eighteenth-century Sheraton dining table.²²

Next came an hour or more devoted to the daily correspondence file, with Lasker scribbling comments in pencil on the various letters and reports. During this ritual—and in fact, throughout most of the day—the secretaries were under strict orders to refrain from speaking to him if a typed message would suffice.

Correspondence was typically followed by a dictation session, when Lasker strode around his office giving oral responses to his letters, issuing directives to his subordinates in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Toronto, London, or Paris, or perhaps nudging family members in one direction or another. (Letters to one member of the immediate family were automatically copied and sent to all others.)

Outgoing phone calls were placed in the order that Lasker specified. When phone calls came in, the secretaries checked Lasker’s “black book” to see if he knew the caller. If he did, the secretary typed out the name and put it in front of him, and he either took the call or shook his head no. When someone was relegated to the “no” list often enough, they stayed there; Lasker was henceforth “either out of the city” or “tied up” when that person called. One woman in particular achieved a special deep-banishment status: “Mrs. Mina Shakman will send letters to Mr. Lasker and seldom is her name signed. The handwriting is large and unmistakable. Never show them to Mr. Lasker but discard them. Should she call on the telephone she will say it is a personal friend but he is not to be told that she has called. Treat with kindness always so that she cannot take offense.”

Of course, no one who wasn’t known to Lasker could hope to walk in off the street, pass through those three sets of doors, and secure an audience with the master. Even if they carried an impressive letter of introduction, they were asked to leave the letter with the receptionist, who would get back to the visitor as soon as possible.

This was the highly structured life that Lasker, in his July 1938 announcement, now proposed to give up.

He named the forty-six-year-old Don Francisco, spearhead of the California campaigns, as his successor, and also promoted David Noyes and Sheldon Coons to the posts of executive vice president. According to Time, the scuttlebutt within the industry was that Lasker had grown “more interested in cruises than in clients,” and had long planned to quit the agency.²³ For his part, Lasker informed his clients that he had always intended to “withdraw from active service” as president of Lord & Thomas when he completed his fortieth year of service with the agency—a milestone that he had reached on May 31. “I shall retain financial interest in Lord & Thomas,” he said, “and shall contribute to the agency’s policies as may be required.”²⁴

This decision was soon reversed. Francisco did not thrive in his new job, in large part because Lasker never really left the stage. In October 1940, Francisco took a leave of absence from Lord & Thomas to work in Washington with Nelson A. Rockefeller on relations between the United States and Latin American countries; the leave turned out to be permanent.

That fall, Lasker—still grieving over the loss of Flora and afflicted by the ever-present specter of depression—left Chicago for what he thought would be an extended recuperation in California. (Just before departing, he made another precipitous and perhaps symbolic decision: selling off the herd of prize-winning Guernsey cattle at Mill Road Farm.) By that point, his friend and long-ago political mentor, Will Hays, had been serving as the moral policeman of Hollywood for a dozen years. Hays, convinced that what the grieving and disoriented Lasker needed was a new wife, arranged a series of dinners with eligible Hollywood starlets.

At one of those dinners, probably in September, Lasker re-encountered Doris Kenyon, an accomplished actor and singer who had achieved national celebrity during the silent-film era—signing a movie contract in 1916 while still a teenager for an astounding $50,000 per year, and starring in one of Paramount’s first all-talking pictures (Interference, 1929)—but whose acting career had been trailing off for a decade.²⁵ Over the course of that career, she had run afoul of censors both in New York and Hollywood, owing in equal parts to her assertive personality and her smoldering screen persona.²⁶ One of those censors was Will Hays—who in 1931 had objected strongly to a Warner Bros. film, The Road to Singapore, which starred Kenyon and William Powell as a pair of hot-blooded and unrepentant adulterers—but Hays and Kenyon nevertheless became friends.²⁷

Kenyon divorced her second husband in 1933, and was evidently open to finding a new partner. Then forty years old, she was still striking, with wide-set eyes, a broad and ready smile, and wavy blond hair. Lasker had met her briefly in California the previous fall, just before embarking on his world tour. On this second encounter, the ad man and the actress became infatuated with each other, and decided to marry immediately.

The couple signed a prenuptial agreement on October 14, 1938. Lasker’s net worth was then in excess of $10 million—mainly in the form of securities and his Florida and Illinois properties—whereas Kenyon (who had an eleven-year-old son from her first marriage) had almost no assets. The agreement stipulated that if Kenyon was still living with Lasker as his wife when he died, she would be entitled to a lump-sum payment of $200,000 and could keep any properties that they acquired together. In the case of a divorce or separation, the prenuptial agreement would become null and void.²⁸

The wedding was scheduled to take place in Lasker’s apartment at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on October 28. Francie Lasker agreed to stay with Kenyon during the two days of festivities. She remembered Kenyon as naive but charming—“a lovely woman”—and recalled that October interlude as a jarring combination of drama and farce:

The whole thing was really heartbreaking. It was too ridiculous. I mean, he was a man in his fifties. Father had this dinner with 50 people two nights before he was married. I remember looking at everybody. I was in the middle of the table, and he was at the end of it. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

It was so strange. The night before he was married, he had a bachelor’s dinner. Doris and I were having dinner in the rooms, and she turned to me and said, “Frances, is your father always like this?”

Oh, my god! That’s no marriage, right?²⁹

After exchanging vows—and after Lasker gave his new bride a magnificent sable coat as a wedding gift—the couple set sail on the Île de France for a honeymoon in England.³⁰ Almost immediately, it became clear that the marriage had been a terrible mistake. Lasker found that in the company of a movie star, he was no longer the center of attention. He badgered and bullied her in small ways, insisting—for example—that she eat foods that she disliked.³¹ He experienced problems with impotence, no doubt a devastating blow to a man whose new wife had been, for millions, the embodiment of sex appeal.³² Well before the monthlong honeymoon was over, the union had collapsed. Lasker sent an urgent cable to his son-in-law, Gerhard Foreman, begging for help in dissolving the marriage. Upon the Laskers’ return to the United States on December 1, they immediately split up. Lasker moved in with Gerhard and Mary at their North State Street home in Chicago; he lived there for several months, his emotional health in peril.

Kenyon behaved admirably throughout the humiliating episode. Although Lasker paid her $375,000 as a full settlement on December 21, 1938—very generous, in light of the terms of their prenuptial agreement—no public word of the couple’s troubles leaked out until the following year. On February 6, a distraught Lasker, unraveling quickly, checked himself into the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.³³ Two weeks later, Kenyon admitted to reporters that she and Lasker had split. “Mr. Lasker and I found our hasty marriage incompatible,” she said. “We have decided to end it, and thus maintain our valued friendship, for we hold only the highest regard for each other.”³⁴

In June, Kenyon traveled to Reno, where the divorce was finalized on June 8, 1939.³⁵ By that time, Lasker was already obsessed with the woman who would become his third wife, and he tried hard—and successfully—to erase the painful memory of this disastrous marital interlude. Some years later, Lasker saw an attractive woman in a theater. “I know that pretty woman,” he said to his new wife. “I know her. What’s her name? Who is she?”

That pretty woman was Doris Kenyon.³⁶

Concurrent with the disastrous Kenyon affair was Lasker’s involvement in a series of legal proceedings, collectively known as the “Manton case,” which also caused Lasker much misery.

The case grew out of a $250,000 loan that he had made in 1932 at the request of his friend Paul H. Hahn, legal adviser and vice president of the American Tobacco Company, and an assistant to George Washington Hill.³⁷ Lasker believed that the loan was intended to cover stock losses suffered by executives at American Tobacco, perhaps even Hill himself. He had good reason for thinking so: a year earlier, he had loaned $150,000 to Louis Levy—another of his friends, and a partner in the New York law firm of Stanchfield & Levy, which represented American Tobacco—for this same purpose.³⁸

Lasker made the loan personally, rather than through the business, although his decision certainly was influenced by the fact that American Tobacco was then a $19 million Lord & Thomas account, with commissions running around $2.8 million a year. Ralph Sollitt signed the check for Lasker and delivered it—in May 1932—to a shady intermediary named James J. Sullivan.³⁹ This time, though, the funds never reached American Tobacco executives. Instead, they were funneled into several firms controlled by U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals judge Martin T. Manton.

Manton, senior judge on the three-judge court in New York City, had no qualms about engaging in business as a sitting judge; in fact, he owned or controlled a dozen corporations and used his judicial position to benefit those companies. (Manton’s abuse of his position was well known in the underworld, and had earned him the nickname of “Preying Manton.”) Sullivan was one of his many partners. A month after receiving Lasker’s money, however indirectly, Manton provided the tie-breaking vote on a verdict in favor of American Tobacco in a $10 million stockholder lawsuit.⁴⁰

Lasker soon realized that the loan had the potential to be embarrassing to him, and he tried for several years to collect from Sullivan, who died in 1935.⁴¹ Another three years passed, at which point the headline-hungry New York district attorney, Thomas Dewey, began investigating Manton’s affairs. In September 1938, that investigation led Dewey’s staff to Albert Lasker, who told them everything he knew about the loan.

On January 30, 1939, on the front page of the New York Times, Dewey accused Manton of accepting bribes from at least six litigants in return for favorable verdicts. Lasker’s role in the drama appeared on page 3—mortifying publicity for a man who rarely sought it.⁴²

Manton resigned from the federal bench and was indicted by a federal grand jury in April. At his trial in May, the prosecution called Lasker as a witness. Because the statute of limitations on the incidents involving Lasker had expired, the case against Manton did not include any criminal charges pertaining to the Lasker loan. But the details of that loan were introduced as evidence, and Lasker was called upon to explain himself.

Lasker believed that his good name was at stake. He was closely connected to several of the principals in the case, and his money had lined the pockets of a corrupt federal judge. He became increasingly agitated, convinced that the case would ruin him.

Those worries turned out to be misplaced. The evidence showed unequivocally that he had known nothing about the scheme. In fact, as his testimony and that of others amply demonstrated, Lasker was a victim, rather than a perpetrator. Manton was convicted on corruption charges, and spent seventeen months in federal prison.⁴³

While Lasker’s friends Hahn and Levy faced no criminal charges, disbarment proceedings were initiated against both men in the summer of 1939. Late that summer, Lasker returned to court to testify against them. Again, he proved a strong witness, with the judge in the case noting that Lasker had been “shamefully treated” by his friends. United States Attorney John Cahill even extended compliments to Lasker: “The only person whose conduct is consistent with his testimony of what took place is Albert D. Lasker of the firm of Lord & Thomas, who, it seems to us, has been grossly misused in the situation, and in fairness to them I think it should publicly be said that we find absolutely no ground for criticism of the conduct of Lord & Thomas.”⁴⁴

Levy—who was deeply involved in Manton’s many schemes—was disbarred.⁴⁵ Hahn, although scolded by the presiding judge for his poor judgment, was exonerated, and later became president of American Tobacco. To Lasker, these were secondary concerns; what mattered to him was his own good name. “A. D. Lasker wholly blameless,” read the welcome subhead on the front page of the Times.⁴⁶

During this bizarre interlude in Albert Lasker’s life—rife with both private and public turmoil—Boyden Sparkes continued to labor away on the autobiography. He conducted interviews with people who had known Lasker at all stages of his life, ranging from family members and high school friends to potentates at the highest reaches of corporate America. When possible, he met on a monthly basis with Lasker. By March 1938, he had generated 378 pages of personal interviews with Lasker and 761 pages of interviews with others.

By this time, too, he probably had inklings that the project was in trouble. It had taken Sparkes only a week to do the background interviews in and around Detroit for his Alfred Sloan biography; now, given the turmoil in Lasker’s professional and personal lives, this new book threatened to drag on indefinitely.

In March 1939, shortly after checking out of the Mayo Clinic, a beleaguered Lasker stunned Sparkes by telling him that throughout all of their interviews to date, he had been “a man practically in a state of amnesia,” and couldn’t be held responsible for his words. As Sparkes noted in a memo to himself:

What does this mean? If I accept his statement—and he said it so many times as to leave me no choice—it means that none of the material he gave me previously can be regarded as valid. It means that I have to start from the beginning.

Now, I expect to rewrite where I have failed to capture the spirit of a story or for some other failure of my own, but I can’t be held accountable for such a thing as this. A study of my conversations with Mr. Lasker shows many other conflicts, conflicts in instructions. I have no desire to take the slightest advantage of him. I do believe that if he had not burdened me with so many instructions, I would have been through with his story, that it would have been published in the Saturday Evening Post months before several embarrassing circumstances had arisen to plague this undertaking.⁴⁷

Lasker continued to offer Sparkes intermittent encouragement—as in the spring of 1940, when he wrote that he hoped the manuscript that Sparkes had started writing “after the first of the year is nearing, or has reached completion.”⁴⁸ But, conflicted, he also sabotaged Sparkes’s efforts to get the story serialized in the Post.

The project stalled. Client and author had reached an impasse over money, scope, and distribution of the work, but that wasn’t the real problem. Lasker had moved on to new realms, with a new partner. For Lasker, then at the end of one phase of his life and the beginning of another, looking back simply proved too painful.