She was completely aware of the boldly appraising way that Simon had been looking at her, he knew, and he did not have any impression that it displeased her at all. He observed that she did not seem to have brought it to her escort’s attention, as a woman will when she is annoyed by such a scrutiny.
“I’d never have visualized her in a dispensary,” Simon remarked. “Or at an industrial board meeting, for that matter.”
“Don’t let that Vargas build fool you. As I hear it, she did most of the originating of those concoctions. And as a business woman, by all accounts, she’s sent some big wheels back with their kingpins wobbling.”
“Tell me more.”
David Stern hospitably refilled the Saint’s glass from the bottle of Alsace-Willm Gewurztraminer in the ice bucket beside them.
“I don’t go in much for gossip, but this seems to be pretty factual...”
Whatever else she was rumoured to have been before, or on the side, Mrs Elise Ashville had certainly been a waitress at the soda fountain of Richard Ashville’s modest neighborhood drugstore until she married him and began to infuse her ambitious energy into his humble business. Until then, reportedly, he thought he had already attained his personal pinnacle when he became the proprietor of a store of his own (subject to a reasonable mortgage) and had been prepared to bumble placidly through his declining years retailing the standard nostrums, scraping the standard profit off cokes and comic books, and compounding such prescriptions as came his way. He was a gentle and unassuming man whose ailing mother had successfully monopolized him until she died shortly before Elise came to work for him, by which time he was well into an unsophisticated middle age, and he had been mildly astonished when this gorgeous creature accepted the proposal which his glands forced through his shyness.
It was not long after an exhausting honeymoon, however, that he discovered that her concept of a woman’s part in a partnership was more vigorous than his mother’s in more ways than one. Browsing along the shelves while he was taking stock after closing one night, she said, “I was reading an article about what a terrific profit there is in some of this stuff, how the ingredients in a bottle that people pay more than a dollar for are worth maybe only five cents. But you only make a little bit of that profit. Why don’t we put up our own mixtures and make all of it?”
Mr Ashville painstakingly explained to her that the public would not come in and ask for these mixtures unless it had first been conditioned to think it needed them, by lavish promotion and advertising, on which the manufacturers spent a fantastic amount of the apparent gravy.
“Phooey,” said the dynamic Elise. “They’ve got a lot of overhead and stockholders to pay, too. We can put a small ad in the local papers for a few bucks and bottle the stuff ourselves.”
From there on it was the kind of homespun success story beloved by Reader’s Digest, except that the end products would never have earned the endorsement of that periodical. Not that there was anything actively poisonous or even especially deleterious about the pills and potions put out by the Ashville Pharmacal factory — the Food and Drug Administration would have seen to that, even without the help of Mr Ashville’s unreconstructed conscience — but neither would they do anyone much good, other than psychologically. This trivial imperfection, however, did no perceptible harm to the sales.
Juven-Aids (“To help restore that youthful feeling”) contained, for instance, only a few B-vitamins, harmless amounts of phosphorus and nux vomica, and minimal quantities of a common ataraxic, but hundreds of thousands were swallowed, three times a day after meals, by customers who were convinced that they felt better for them, or at least that they would have felt worse without them.
Dreemicreem (“For the skin a queen might envy”) was something that Elise herself whipped up, literally with an egg beater, in the beginning, out of a detergent, an astringent, some mayonnaise that had gone rancid, and a cheap perfume to disguise it: smeared on myriads of hopeful faces, just before washing with plain cold water, according to the instructions, it undoubtedly cleansed their pores as effectively as any soap and could not have left any more wrinkles than were there to start with.
VervaTonique (“Blended from the same herbs and fruits to which many ancient philosophers attributed the secret of long life and vigour”) also assayed twenty-five per cent alcohol by volume, if you could read the smallest print on the label, so that any of its highly respectable addicts, which included staunch supporters of the WCTU, who knocked back an ounce of it whenever they felt enervated, as the directions suggested, were benefited by the same jolt as if they had belted a good highball down to the halfway mark, without any moral qualms to detract from the resultant euphoria.
Elise turned out to have an unsuspected executive instinct, as well as a positive genius for skirting the law by juggling words into the kind of advertising claim that hinted exuberantly at miracles and only on the closest analysis could be proved to have promised practically nothing. In three breathtaking strides the local enterprise had grown to state-wide, to regional, and finally to national dimension, with the assistance of some frightening financial parlays, but it rode such an unbroken run of luck that in only five years it was in what Dun & Bradstreet called “a sound progressive condition” and could let its managing directrice draw a lavish stipend and a lush expense account with no protest from its creditors.
“So what’s wrong with that?” Simon inquired. “It’s hardly retailing gossip to say that they started on a shoestring and boiled it into oceans of slop that they’re selling at the price of soup. Maybe their ethics are dubious, but I can’t help feeling that the suckers they sell to are almost fair game.”
“Without getting into that argument,” said the publisher, “the rest of it is a bit less equivocal.”
Mrs Ashville, whose personality and tastes had been expanding as rapidly as her business, had begun to find the time and inclination for a more glamorous social life, which she indulged with increasingly frequent and protracted visits to New York, Palm Springs, and Miami Beach, where she became a regular feature of the café society columns, which reported her holding hands with a number of different squires whose impressive-sounding titles were usually better known than their credit ratings. When even the diffident Mr Ashville rebelled against being thus publicly cuckolded, at least by inference, and suggested a divorce, she obliged him promptly. It was only then that he was reminded, by coldly practical lawyers, that she owned outright the controlling percentage of stock in Ashville Pharmacal Products, which had been founded almost indulgently as a toy for her to play with, that he had even laughingly signed a document that she brought him in the early days specifically declaring that he did not in any way regard it as community property, and that the most he could claim from the Corporation, aside from his rights as the personal holder of one paid-up share, would be the few hundred dollars he had advanced to get it started.