Certain People Read online

  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 to
ld, 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.”

  George Johnson smiles contentedly at this thought, and accepts a cup of coffee that his black butler offers him on a silver tray. George Johnson continues smiling and with, perhaps, more than just a trace of smugness adds, “Johnny Johnson’s son was a high school dropout.”

  Meanwhile, as the Johnsons bicker and jockey for position, another dissatisfied voice has been heard from in Chicago—this time from a woman. She is Mrs. Bettie Pullen-Walker, an animated auburn-haired lady in her middle thirties, who edits and publishes MsTique magazine, which she calls “the very first magazine to be published anywhere that gives a consistently positive view of the black female.” With fiction and articles on such subjects as “Are You a Sex Symbol,” “When the Affair Is Over,” “Unmasking the (Married) Players,” and “Living In or Shacking Up,” MsTique is clearly intended as a black answer to Cosmopolitan, and Bettie Pullen-Walker has been referred to as a black Helen Gurley Brown. Mrs. Pullen-Walker, whose maiden name was Thompson (her hyphenated name combines the names of two previous husbands), is both a member of the black Old Guard and of the new achievers. She traces her ancestry back to Columbia, South Carolina, where, in the middle 1800s, her maternal great-grandmother inherited considerable property, which has remained in the family to this day. This great-grandmother married a man named Ben Frazier, a Muskogean Indian from Mississippi, and family legend has it that Ben Frazier’s ancestors were early Indian activists—moving across the plains attempting to frustrate the white man’s efforts to relocate all Indians to reservations and to induce them to give up all their tribal ties. Ben Frazier himself made a tidy fortune as a fur trader.

  Most of Bettie Pullen-Walker’s family have been educators, and it was as a teacher that she started out after graduating as a psychology major from Roosevelt University in 1964. In 1973, as a woman of some means, Mrs. Pullen-Walker decided to branch out, and MsTique was launched—complete with a Cosmopolitan-like cover girl and centerfold (though not nude). It is probably too early to say how successful MsTique will eventually be, and it is still not running completely in the black. Mrs. Pullen-Walker blames this on advertiser—and advertising agency—indifference to “approximately fifteen million black females in this land,” and she complains of being “shoved around” by agency representatives. She says, “I have never experienced a more circular pattern of referrals, unkept promises, requests for marketing material that are not ever acknowledged, unreturned telephone calls, and a whole range of disrespectful and unbusinesslike behavior as I have had from agency representatives.”

  Her new venture, she points out, has been more than adequately publicized in the news media in general. But she claims that MsTique has been largely ignored by the black press because of the fierce competition for advertising. She also blames sexism. “Sexism is also rampant among black males, who dominate the black press,” she says.

  From this, one assumes she is talking about men like John Johnson.

  III

  The Old Guard

  5

  Family Trees

  George Johnson insists that his personal philosophy is based on two principles. “First, I believe in the Golden Rule,” he says. “It really works. It’s a great formula for success. Second, a man has got to believe in casting bread upon the waters. I’m more concerned, with what I give than with what I receive.” To put this theory to work, Johnson has established two foundations. One of these busies itself contributing funds to 290 different charitable organizations—black, nonblack, “and even Jewish”—on an annual basis. The second is dedicated to minority youth, primarily black, who want an education. “We have a hundred and twenty kids in school right now that we’re supporting,” Johnson says.

  Education has always provided the principal avenue out of the ghettos for all minority groups. But, Johnson feels, too many educated blacks have gone into teaching, or the clergy, or have become doctors or lawyers—where the opportunities to make money are limited. “There haven’t been too many blacks venturing into business,” he says. “And that’s what my foundation’s for—poor black kids who can handle responsibilities and who want to make it in business. Because that’s the only way they’re going to make it—in business.” This is one reason why, he says, he put his new office building where it is—in the predominantly black South Side and not, as John Johnson did, on fashionable Michigan Avenue. “School buses with black kids go back and forth in front of my building every day,” he says. “They see it, and maybe they say to themselves, ‘There’s a black man who’s got a big business. Maybe I can start a business like that someday.’” Tours of his factory are conducted regularly for black schoolchildren in the area, and the message offered by the tour guides is always the same: “If there’s going to be improvement and progress among our people, it’s going to come about through more black business.”

  Not all the members of America’s black elite would agree with George Johnson’s emphasis on business education—nor, for that matter, would many upper-class blacks agree that either George or John Johnson qualifies as spokesman for either the upper class or for blacks in general. “After all, who are the Johnsons, anyway?” sniffs one black woman from Chicago, whose family hubris has been pronounced for several generations. “I knew that I was of the elite when I was born. We were the family that other blacks looked up to. Nobody really looks up to those Johnsons. Oh, of course they’ve gotten very fancy, with their big houses, their yachts and Cadillacs. We have an expression for people like that—‘nigger rich.’”

  There is more to black improvement and progress, many people feel, than simply making large sums of money—much more. It is a question of breeding, manners, speech, family background, and a way of “doing things.” Seemliness and probity count for more than property or possessions, and many Old Guard blacks regard such families as the Johnsons as vulgar upstarts, nouveaux riches who, with their ostentatious ways, are little more than an embarrassment and, as a result, do their race more harm than goo
d. It is very much like the way Old Guard Jewish families regard the Jews who show up at Miami Beach hotels and wear mink stoles and diamonds with their swimsuits, or the way the Old Line Irish mocked their new-rich countrymen who hung lace curtains at their windows. It is the classic battle between the established family and the newcomer. If you’ve got it, the Old Guard feel, you don’t flaunt it.

  Mr. and Mrs. John W. Fleming live on a winding, tree-lined street called Iris Avenue in Cincinnati. Iris Avenue is a street of private homes in the $40,000 to $75,000 range and, because the street dead-ends, it is quiet with very little traffic. It is in an area called Kennedy Heights, which is not only expensive but also integrated. Though Lina Fleming says, “White people don’t like you if you look too much like them,” she gets along well with her white neighbors. Most of her friends, however, are black or, like herself, the color of coffee with lots of cream.

  Lina Fleming, in her middle fifties, is a woman of promptly revealed opinions, who admits that many of her tartly expressed sentiments have ruffled feathers on both sides of the racial fence. “I don’t think integration is the answer. I think the Negro schools did a great job.” (Like many Old Guard blacks, she eschews the fashionable word “black” for the more traditional “Negro.”) She also says, “I don’t believe in busing. I don’t think it’s necessary.” More than anything, she is infused with an overwhelming sense of family pride, and has outlined a book that she intends to write, to be called, simply, “The Family.” Sample from Mrs. Fleming’s outline: “Note their dress, their speech, and their habits of walking, greeting, etc. Note their table manners, manners of cleaning their houses, making and unmaking their beds, preparing their meals, especially specific kinds of food, etc.” “We were somebody,” she says. “We were people of status. We were of good stock.” She also admits that her black-skinned husband is not of as good stock. “I’m an Episcopalian,” she said. “My mother thought the Episcopalians were more liberal. He’s a Baptist, and a member of the Bethel Baptist Church. Bethel Baptist is headed up by Reverend and Mrs. Harry Brown. She’s the social arbiter of the church. He was a janitor and she was a beautician. But Brown went to the University, and took speech lessons, and they both went to a seminary and got degrees. Mrs. Brown puts on weddings. She puts on big banquets, with flaming baked Alaska. But some of those Baptists have never been outside the city, have never been to a hotel.”