The Golden Dream (7 page)

Cincinnati, meanwhile, like Atlanta, is in many ways a one-company town. And just as Coca-Cola money rules along Paces Ferry Road, Procter & Gamble is the
éminence grise
of Cincinnati. Which suburb one chooses often depends on where one stands with P&G. If a man, for example, is in what P&G calls “middle management,” he will likely live in Wyoming (no views). Higher Procter & Gamble executives will be found in Hyde Park, with views. The highest executives of all will be found in Indian Hill, where Procter & Gamble president Edward G. Harness lives in a large house, with a separate listing for “children's residence.” People “waiting to get into Indian Hill” tend to wait in such cozy, folksy communities as nearby Terrace Park or “the perfect planned community” of Mariemont, a 423-acre development of look-alike Cape Cod houses designed, more or less, to create the atmosphere of an English Village, with a central green, winding streets, and Georgian Colonial shops with mullioned windowpanes. Mariemont looks as if it had been built all at once by a little old lady who liked chintz—which, indeed, it was: by the late Mrs. Mary M. Emery in 1922.

Glendale, however, is a suburb that has become almost exclusively Procter & Gamble, and Glendale people tend to see a great deal of one another and very little of the rest of Cincinnati. “Glendale,” says one woman, “is a world unto itself.” William Cooper Procter, the founder of Procter & Gamble, lived in Glendale, and ever since, the citizens of Glendale have been regarded collectively as “the Procter & Gamble people.” The Procter & Gamble people, as far as the rest of the city is concerned, have no names. As one P&G executive, who, typically, refuses to be named, explains it: “At Procter & Gamble, there are no heroes. There is only the company itself. It is an unwritten rule that individuals are never singled out for attention or publicity. The individual is merely part of the team.”

But at Procter & Gamble it goes even further than that. Not only are names and individuals underplayed, but the company itself does its best to keep
its
name out of the limelight. Reticence is the
unspoken corporate motto. The job of Procter & Gamble's publicity department appears primarily to be to prevent publicity about the company. Old Mr. Procter, it seems, believed that corporate publicity was not just a waste of time, but actually dangerous. “Advertise the
products
,” he used to say, “not the company that made 'em.” To this day, the word “TIDE” blazes from the orange-and-blue detergent box, but only in the tiniest print can be found the words “Made by Procter & Gamble.”

Cincinnati people are curiously ambivalent about what is called the “Procter & Gamble Presence.” On the one hand, most Cincinnatians are glad to have the company headquartered there. Many of the city's greatest fortunes, though technically rooted in other forms of commercial endeavor, from broadcasting (Tafts, who started in newspapers) to machine tools (Emerys, who started as candle merchants, were substantially helped along by early investments in P & G stock. “On my grandfather's deathbed, he said, ‘Never sell your Procter & Gamble,'” declares one woman. And certainly Procter & Gamble
fits
Cincinnati—a smooth, conservative, understated corporation which is run as efficiently and anonymously as the entire nation of Switzerland. P & G offers the safest of investments; throughout the Depression, it never passed a dividend. As an employer, it provides the safest of jobs. Once hired, a P&G person is seldom fired except for gross, repeated malfeasance. Just as there are no heroes at P&G, neither are there villains.

On the other hand, it is easy to laugh at Procter & Gamble, and there is a tendency to speak disparagingly and condescendingly of socially inbred and insulated little Glendale. “I don't know anybody there,” says one woman, implying that Glendale people are not only faceless but not very interesting. Certainly, on the surface, Glendale is an unremarkable-looking township with not much in the way of beauty—or even beautiful houses—to recommend it. It has a bland, self-satisfied look, not unlike the bland façade of Procter & Gamble's downtown corporate headquarters—a low, flat, white stone rectangle that has been compared to a large cake of Ivory soap lying on its side—facing the blandest of little parks. It is easy, too, to poke fun at P&G's folksy, down-home, small-town ways. Though it is a multinational corporation, it still holds regular family picnic outings for its employees and their families and, each Christmas, delivers a gift basket of chicken and other goodies to each and every person on the payroll. At the same time, the company's influence on the city's life is vast and pervasive. If, for example, Procter & Gamble is unhappy with a school superintendent, it has ways of
seeing that he will be replaced. The two wary newspapers, the
Post
and the
Enquirer
, are careful not to tread on Procter & Gamble's toes. Not long ago, a local magazine,
Cincinnati
, purchased an article that, in part, was critical of Procter & Gamble. When the article was published, the offending material had been mysteriously excised.

The influence of Procter & Gamble on the city has not always been benign. Several years ago, the company decided that it wanted to tear down the old Wesley chapel on East Fifth Street to make room for its private park. As is usual when anything of historic worth in Cincinnati is threatened, Cincinnatians were up in arms. The Wesley chapel was the oldest religious building in Cincinnati, and had been in continuous use since 1831. President William Henry Harrison's funeral services had been held there, and John Quincy Adams had stood in the chapel's pulpit. When Procter & Gamble's demolition plans were announced, a group of citizens formed and obtained an injunction to provide a stay of execution. As the date of the expiration of the injunction drew near, a second injunction was sought and its supporters felt sure it would be forthcoming. Then, on midnight of the date of expiration, in a display of high corporate arrogance, Procter & Gamble sent in wrecking crews. In the morning, Cincinnatians woke to find their lovely old chapel gone.

Others have learned that dealing with Procter & Gamble can be frustrating. Lawyer Sidney Weil finds it off-putting that when the “Procter & Gamble people” go out, they never go out alone. “Whenever you have business to conduct with the company,” he says, “you can never seem to deal with one man. There are always two—a second guy to back up the first. You feel hedged in a two-against-one situation.”

Perhaps because of local attitudes like this toward the company, there is a noticeable ambivalence, too, in the way the Procter & Gamble people feel about themselves—a rueful smile when they identify their employer, as though it were necessary to apologize. To be sure, there is nothing particularly chic or glamorous about being in the soap business, and Procter & Gamble people tend to describe their jobs in terms of “market research” or “product development” or “regional sales.” “Try to pin him down on what he really
does
,” says one man, “and a P&G man will rattle off corporate sales figures. He just won't
tell
you what he does. Sometimes I wonder if he really knows.”

And perhaps this is why middle-to-upper-management Procter
& Gamble people have gravitated to the suburb of Glendale—like the company, a prosperous but hardly glamorous community. There, in the shadow of their late founder's house, they can mingle with each other, forget about what the rest of Cincinnati thinks—or doesn't think—about them, and console and comfort one another for the well-paid, job-safe anonymity of their collective lives.

6

Small Town

For years, Mr. William Cooper Procter's company was noticeably non-Semitic, if not anti-Semitic, and even today, few Jews are found on high rungs of the corporate ladder. (In the company's early days, no blacks at all were employed except as janitors and messengers.) At one point, so a favorite Procter & Gamble story goes, the company was about to launch a new laundry product which, after much market research, it planned to call Dreck. Advertising plans, layouts, and schedules were drawn up to present Dreck to the American soap-buying public. Only at the last moment—and in the nick of time—was it discovered that
dreck
is a Yiddish word meaning “dirt.” Hastily, the name of the new soap powder was changed to Dreft.

Meanwhile, though the rest of Cincinnati may chuckle at what goes on in Glendale and at P&G, it takes very seriously what goes on in Indian Hill. While practically all the residents of this hilltop community of great estates are wealthy, a number of the homes of the first settlers here reveal the more plebeian origins of the area and are still extensive, and working, farms, with barns and sheds and outbuildings. At Indian Hill cocktail parties, the talk is as likely to center around the current tomato crop as around the Dow Jones averages. Nearly everyone in Indian Hill, it seems, owns a tractor, and for years, tractor parties—with guests arriving behind the wheels of their machines—have been a summer tradition. “It isn't really gentleman farming, you see, it's more like playing at farming
,” explains one woman. Mrs. Edgar Mack (Mr. Mack's money is from malt which goes into Cincinnati beer) even has a slipcover for her tractor—a pretty flowered chintz that matches her china pattern. For her summer picnics, which have become something of a local legend, she slips the slipcovers on the tractor and on the wagon that is drawn behind it, and spreads the wagon with delicacies and drinkables. Her husband—in a blazer with a pocket emblem that says “Blome Road Tractor & Tennis Society”—then gets behind the wheel and drives the movable feast among the assembled guests while his wife, in a farmerette outfit, sits on his lap being hostessy.

Though Indian Hill tries to look countrified and old, it is really not that venerable a community. Originally, wealthy Cincinnatians lived on the west side of town or to the north, in the gaslit section called Clifton, where many old mansions still stand. (Today, Clifton has largely been taken over by physicians from the nearby hospitals and by faculty of the University of Cincinnati, whose campus is also nearby; it has become Cincinnati's “intellectual” suburb, and is appropriately dowdy.) Then Madison Road, leading eastward along the river, began to develop. One senior resident, Mrs. Russell Wilson, remembers when Madison was still a dirt road. And when Keys Crescent, one of the city's grander addresses, was first built just off Madison Road, Mrs. Wilson and one of her girlhood friends wrote “Stink Street” in the fresh concrete just outside the Crescent's entrance. Madison Road led into Hyde Park, where more big, imposing houses were built, particularly along Grandin Road, where they could command splendid river views. At the end of Madison Road lay Indian Hill—so named because an Indian burial ground had been discovered there—and in the 1920s, a group of wealthy Cincinnati businessmen formed a corporation, bought up some twenty square miles of farmland, and turned Indian Hill into the enclave of wealth that it is today. They added such standard accouterments as an exclusive country club—the Camargo—polo, fox hunting, golf, and a private police force.

Back in Hyde Park, however, along Grandin Road and its side streets—with the river on one side and the grounds of the Cincinnati Country Club on the other—there is little agreement that Indian Hill is the better address. “Is that Grandin Road group still going strong?” asked Alice Roosevelt Longworth, whose husband was a Cincinnatian, not long ago. It is, and people who live on or near Grandin Road consider themselves a breed both privileged and singularly blessed. They point out that Indian Hill, because of its
greater distance from the city, is a bit out of touch with things and, with its tractor parties, even out of touch with reality. They add that most of the city's movers and shakers—those not connected with P&G, at least—live in Hyde Park, on or off Grandin Road.

This is true. On Grandin Road are the Ralph Corbetts, for example. Corbett is the self-made multimillionaire who turned an idea for musical doorbell chimes into the giant Nu Tone corporation and whose Corbett Foundation has poured millions of dollars into the city to support its cultural institutions, particularly those in the field of music. (And in the process, some say, the Corbetts have managed to irk certain of the Old Guard families who
might
have been, but have not been, equally generous.) The Corbett name decorates dozens of prestigious boards and committees, but a part of Cincinnati will never quite forget that Ralph Corbett was born in Flushing, New York.

Hard by the Corbetts live various members of the large and wealthy Lazarus clan, whose Federated Department Stores include Bloomingdale's, I. Magnin, Rich's in Atlanta, and, in Cincinnati, Shillito's, the city's largest store. As far as Old Cincinnati is concerned, of course, the Lazaruses exist in a kind of limbo similar to the Corbetts'. Everybody agrees that the Lazaruses are
important
. Everyone
likes
the Lazaruses. Mr. Ralph Lazarus is frequently consulted on economic matters by United States Presidents. Mrs. Fred Lazarus III is unquestionably one of the city's two or three most important women. She heads the Ohio Arts Council, has her own television program, is into all sorts of civic and philanthropic doings, and is renowned as a hostess—particularly for visiting artists and performers with the opera, symphony, ballet, or theater. But Irma Lazarus was born in Brooklyn, and her husband's family was originally from Columbus. (Oddly enough, her identical twin sister, Mrs. Carl Strauss, may be on firmer ground; her husband's family, the Strausses, are Old Cincinnati.)

Clearly, Cincinnati is a place which attaches great importance to the length of time a family has spent in the city, and the oldest families have been there, almost literally, forever. Birthplace is stressed more than wealth, social position, or education, and a sharp distinction is drawn between people who “are Cincinnati” and those who “aren't Cincinnati” or are “from away.” Mr. John Emery, for example, who headed Emery Industries, Inc., was one of the city's wealthiest manufacturers, benefactors, and an unquestioned business, civic, and social leader. It was his mother who gave the land
and developed the “ideal” community of Mariemont. For years, the 2,200-seat Emery Auditorium housed the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. Yet when it was suggested that John Emery be given the purely honorary title “Mr. Cincinnati,” there were frowns of disapproval and reminders that “John Emery is
not
Cincinnati.” By a fluke of timing on his parents' part, he was born in New York.