Certain People (6 page)

Then, by chance one day he stepped onto an elevator at Fuller, where he noticed that his fellow passenger was a black man with “a disgusted look on his face,” and Johnson fell to talking with the man. The man, it seemed, was a barber on Chicago's South Side, who had come for help to a black company and had been turned down. George Johnson listened sympathetically, and the man invited him to come down to his barbershop. Though the shop was outwardly unprepossessing, when he entered the door George Johnson was impressed to see signed photographs of such men as Duke Ellington and Nat “King” Cole. All the stars of the black entertainment world, it seemed, came to Orville Nelson's barbershop when they were in Chicago to have their hair “processed,” or straightened.

Essentially, all hair straighteners consist of sodium hydroxide, but Johnson immediately saw that Orville Nelson's straightener was a crude product. It was burningly painful to apply to the scalp, and there were often other, more unpleasant, side effects—broken or falling hair, or an itching rash. What was needed, Johnson saw, was an emulsifier—lanolin, mineral oil, or some other oil or combination of substances—to make Mr. Nelson's straightener a product that would be smooth, creamy, painless, and safe to use. At Fuller, George Johnson had learned a bit about emulsifiers. He had also heard tales about people like Madame C. J. Walker of Indianapolis, a manufacturer of
black cosmetics who had become the first woman in America to earn a million dollars, and who had died leaving her daughter a huge fortune. (Madame Walker adopted the title “Madame” because it was something of a tradition in the cosmetics industry; the late Helena Rubinstein, for example, liked to call herself “Madame Rubinstein.” The formula for Madame Walker's first hair straightener for “wayward, wrinkled hair” came to her, she said, in a dream.) Johnson took some of Mr. Nelson's hair straightener away with him and, in his lunch hours, began experimenting with various emulsifiers. He also had a friend named Herbert A. Martini, a German chemist, who had a small laboratory. Martini became interested in the problem, and offered to help Johnson try to solve it. When George Johnson was not working during his Fuller lunch hour or at Martini's lab, he mixed and stirred ingredients over his kitchen stove and sink.

After about six months, Johnson and Martini had arrived at a formula that satisfied them, and brought the result to Orville Nelson. Nelson tried it on his customers, who were immediately so ecstatic that Nelson suggested that he and Johnson form a partnership and go into business together. Nelson, with all his celebrity contacts, would be in charge of sales and promotion. Johnson would be in charge of manufacturing.

When George Johnson presented this idea to his mother, she told him he was crazy. It would mean giving up his good job at Fuller Products. But Johnson, arguing that nothing ventured was nothing gained, insisted that he be allowed at least to try, and his wife, Joan, supported him, believing that it was worth the gamble. And so, in 1954, George Johnson left Fuller Products, his wife took another job, with the criminal court, and the hair straightener called Ultra Wave Hair Culture was officially launched. Johnson and Nelson had figured it would take about $500 to get their new business underway. When George Johnson approached a white loan company for his $250 share, explaining that he wanted the money to start his own business, the loan manager piously explained that blacks did not do well in business. “He told me that he was going to do me a favor, and not give me the money,” Johnson says. Undaunted, he went down the street to another branch office of the same loan company. This time, however, he said that he wanted the money to take his wife on a vacation to California. For this purpose, he was quickly given his $250. In its first day of operations, Johnson's little company was down to exactly one dollar in the bank.

The trouble was that Ultra Wave Hair Culture was
too
good a product. Almost overnight, Orville Nelson's barbershop was doing a round-the-clock business in hair straightening, with customers lined up outside the door. To keep up with his trade, Nelson had no time to do the selling job he had agreed to do, and George Johnson found himself doing all the manufacturing
and
the selling of Ultra Wave. Within two weeks, Johnson realized that his sales potential—black barbershops all over Chicago were snapping up Ultra Wave as fast as he could turn it out and as fast as he could peddle and deliver it to them from door to door—should have been at least $100,000. But, as a one-man operation, it had sales far lower than that. Furthermore, Orville Nelson was getting Ultra Wave at cost, as part of their agreement, and so Nelson was not even a profitable customer. When it became clear that Nelson either could not or would not pull his share of the weight of the business, Johnson sued Nelson, and their partnership was dissolved. Nelson, of course, had in the meantime learned enough about the formula of Ultra Wave to make it himself (cosmetics formulas are not patentable), and so, with the breakup of the partnership, Nelson became Johnson's chief competitor. Johnson's slight edge over Nelson lay in the fact that Johnson now owned the Ultra Wave name—and it was a name that blacks were beginning to ask for in barbershops. It still rankles with George Johnson that Orville Nelson got his picture on the cover of
Ebony
before he did.

In 1955, George Johnson brought his wife into the business to help him out. Joan Johnson had had bookkeeping training, and so she handled the orders and accounts. She also helped put up the merchandise, label the jars, and load the trucks. The Johnsons took turns stirring up vats of Ultra Wave with long sticks. As the mixture cooled, it thickened to the density of a heavy paste, and stirring was backbreaking work. Still, in 1954, George Johnson did $18,000 worth of business. A year later, he did $75,000. That year he leased his first space—in the back of a beauty supply company on Chicago's 63rd Street. Soon more space was needed, and the Johnsons moved again, into a Lithuanian neighborhood, where no blacks were wanted and where their windows were periodically broken and where, once, they were bombed. In 1958, the company moved again to a three-story building out of which, that year, the Johnsons did $250,000 worth of business. They were, it began to seem, on their way.

Up to that point, George Johnson had been selling his product exclusively to barbershops. But his old boss, Mr. S. B. Fuller, with
whom he had remained friendly and whom he still regarded as his mentor, kept reminding him, “Barbers are the worst payers.” And so, in 1958, Johnson decided to move away from barbershops with a women's line, called Ultra Sheen, for beauty parlors. There were a few hair straighteners for women already on the market, but these “relaxers,” as they were called, all required a two-part application—first the cream base, then the actual straightener. For women, hair straightening was a reasonably costly and time-consuming operation, and most women were still straightening their hair with Madame C. J. Walker's straightening formulas and hot comb. Johnson's Ultra Sheen was the first no-base relaxer, and to teach beauticians how to apply it Johnson set up educational clinics—first in Chicago and then in other cities across the country. It took about three years to establish Ultra Sheen in the women's market. Then, in 1966, Johnson was ready to introduce Ultra Sheen to the consumer at the retail level, and launched an extensive national advertising campaign in such black magazines as
Ebony
and
Essence
, on black radio stations and in black newspapers. He also introduced a shampoo and a cream rinse.

In 1967, however, hurrying in the wake of the Civil Rights movement, the natural, or “Afro,” look in black hair came suddenly into vogue, catching George Johnson somewhat off guard. Suddenly black men and women turned away from hair straighteners and were letting their hair grow out and curl at will. Quickly, Johnson came out with Afro Sheen, a product that added highlights to hair done in the Afro style. For the full, bubbly “Blow Out” style, he offered a Blow-Out Kit, which contained a mild relaxer that prevented hair breakage, made it softer and easier to manage. Within a year, Johnson's Afro Sheen products were number one in the marketplace.

In 1969, the Johnson Products Company went public, with an offering on the American Stock Exchange, and by 1974 the company's sales on all its toiletries products were between sixty and seventy million dollars a year. Johnson's company had become known as “the black Procter & Gamble,” and, despite the 1974 recession and stock market slump, Johnson Products stock was still being traded ahead of the original offering price. George Johnson likes to point out that all of his various cosmetic and hair products can be used by white people, and that the make-up requirements of a black woman are no different from those of a white woman just back from a week on a Florida beach. His research has revealed that he has many white
customers. Still, he prefers to concentrate his sales and advertising efforts on the black consumer market, “because that's the market I know.” At the moment, Johnson is experimenting with fragrances—particularly a men's cologne—having discovered that black men are bigger users of cologne than black women.

Not surprisingly, not long after George Johnson launched his men's fragrances, John Johnson came out with a shaving lotion and cologne of his own. The scent is called “Mr. J.” And, naturally, “Mr. J.” is a more expensive item, and is sold only through select department and specialty stores.

George Johnson has been accused, of course, of getting rich “off his own kind,” and of capitalizing, Uncle-Tom-like, on blacks' insecurities and inner needs to achieve “nice white looks,” and to have “good” hair. “What's wrong with that?” he asks. “The need was always there. With my products, I set about fulfilling it. Many black women wish their skins were lighter, wish their hair were straighter. Our makeup lightens their skins, our relaxers straighten their hair, and make these women happier with themselves.”

George Johnson—a burly, easygoing man who seems inwardly much more relaxed than his like-named rival—has also, in the less than twenty years that it took him to rise from relative poverty to the status of a multimillionaire, managed to surround himself more enthusiastically with the trappings of a very rich man. Clearly, no one enjoys having money more than George Johnson. His company headquarters are now housed in a spanking new and lavishly decorated building on Chicago's South Side. With 450 employees, this building is already inadequate, and there are plans afoot for a big new annex in an adjacent vacant lot. For the past five years, George and Joan Johnson and their four children have lived in a sprawling California ranch-style house in the fashionable Chicago suburb of Glencoe, surrounded by manicured gardens, a swimming pool, and pool house. Though they are the only black family on the street or in the immediate neighborhood, they have encountered no racial prejudice. “If a black man has enough money, he can live anywhere,” Johnson says. The Johnsons also have a spectacular sixteen-room winter retreat in the hills above Runaway Bay, Jamaica, where they belong to the adjacent country club. Joan Johnson, still slender and beautiful, with straight, fine hair—“My hair is too fine for the Afro style”—which she wears in a long bob, just touching her shoulders, dresses with the understated expensiveness of a well-to-do suburban matron, favoring
sweaters and skirts and Gucci shoes. She has become something of a legend among her friends for her organizational ability and efficiency. In a single day's shopping in Miami, she completely furnished the Jamaica house. She had to hurry; the Jamaican government was about to impose a ban on imports from the United States.

“It's very simple. When I shop, I buy everything in quadruplicate,” she says. Because, in addtion to the houses in Glencoe and Runaway Bay, the Johnsons also have a weekend retreat—on a six-hundred-acre farm in McHenry, Illinois, where George Johnson runs a cattle-feeding operation with a stock of 1,800 head of cattle. Johnson also owns two more farms in Mississippi—“because that's where I was born, and the property is cheap. Mississippi is a state that has only one way to go—up.” The two Mississippi places comprise 5,000 acres all told, with 1,500 head of cattle on each farm. The larger of the two farms has eleven buildings, including two houses—one for George Johnson and one for his mother. His mother also has the forty-second floor of Chicago's McClurg Court, a building in which her son has a major interest. George Johnson's brother John also has an apartment in the building. The Johnsons' Glencoe house requires a staff of three, and all the other houses are staffed with caretakers. George Johnson flies his own single-engine Beechcraft, and has a seventy-five-foot yacht,
The African Queen
, which sleeps twelve, plus crew, and regularly cruises from Lake Michigan through the St. Lawrence Seaway to Fort Lauderdale, and on into the Caribbean.

In addition to his presidency of Johnson Products, George Johnson is also Chairman of the Board of Chicago's Independence Bank, is on the boards of Commonwealth Edison, the Urban League, Northwestern Memorial Hospital, the Chicago Area Boy Scouts, and the Chicago Lyric Opera. For good measure, the Johnsons are members of the exclusive Tres Vidas Country Club in Acapulco.

George Johnson has brought his two brothers into his company. Brother John is vice president in charge of sales, and brother Robert is traffic manager. Johnson admits that, since he has become rich, a great many relatives whom he had never heard of before “came out of the woodwork,” asking for jobs or, in some cases, money. “I try to help them out,” he says, “but I don't believe in too much nepotism.” And yet the possession of which he is proudest is his oldest son Eric, who is twenty-five. Eric Johnson graduated from Babson Institute, then worked for a while for Procter & Gamble, learning the white side of the toiletries industry. “Then I brought him into my company
for a while, for training,” Johnson says. “Right now, he's in the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago. I have a plan on him. Yes, I have a real overall plan on him. He'll get his master's degree in business—that will take him less than two years. Then he'll go to work for us in marketing. In five years, Eric will be an officer in my company. That's my five-year plan on Eric. Eric is very success-oriented.”