Even this was easier said than done. Corporate HQ raised salaries and hiked dividends. Marketing and Sales saturated the available advertising outlets. There were no more improvements in equipment or machine base to make. Advances in engineering actually encouraged “factory build-down,” shrinking the number of plants for the first time in the corporation’s history. And, of course, saving money.
Research and Development ate what grain was thrown at it and continued to lay golden eggs. But its cost-per-hatch rate faltered with each additional dollar spent. Production already pretty much pressed up against the wall. Soap turned over as rapidly as possible. America simply could not buy cleaning products faster than it already did, no matter how much more the price fell or the quality increased or the packaging improved.
Nothing was big enough to absorb all those revenues but more increase. And so Clare, freshly reorganized for the space age, turned its hand to acquisitions. The new breed of up-and-coming Clare executive was neither salesman nor bean counter. He was a scout, a whiz kid of the Quotron and the annual report, scouring the great foothills of American light industry for pretty geodes, ones that went well with the swelling collection.
The watchword was synergy. The perfect purchase added extra value to Clare’s existing lines, even as it took its own advantages from them. Of course, a soap and lotion firm needed a lustrous cosmetics line. Clare bought one run by a former Chilean fashion model who passed herself off as Spanish émigré nobility. The marriage filled the fashion and business pages alike: a newsworthy match made up in heaven. Clare’s name also turned a mediocre deodorant line into a bastion of surety and protection. It got into the congested shaving cream and gel market by buying up a popular Western European brand and migrating it to the American market.
The Travelot Motel chain converted to Clare toiletries after purchase. Lucy Day Kitchens brought coffee and cake mixes and powdered fruit drinks into the fold. CaliMills, picked up to round out the faltering paper products division, proved a gold mine at the onset of the disposable diaper industry. A controlling share in Grizell, a small drug company, brought the company its first new medical products since the nineteenth century.
Not all the pieces in the conglomerate fit quite so cleanly. Portfolio diversification at times turned gratuitous. At first, Clare concentrated on friendly takeovers. But as the pool of available prospects began to dry up, the top brass began to okay hostile attempts that were both increasingly exciting and expensive.
Somewhere late in the decade, things crested for Clare. America woke one day to find its greatest lakes dying or already dead. The culprit was eutrophication, the aging of waters through biological enrichment. This natural process had somehow begun to accelerate, collapsing a thousand years into ten. Some supernutrient fed the aquatic plants, speeding up the lake and choking it on its own growth. That something, the public concluded, was Awe and all its fellow phosphated detergents.
Clare stood firm in contesting the verdict. Company scientists proved, in experiment after experiment, the complete safety of phosphates. Phosphates were common, natural ingredients found everywhere, even in human food. The real culprit, the company claimed, was untreated human sewage reaching lakes in unprecedented concentrations.
The public rejected the company’s evidence. By law and choice, it turned to phosphate-free formulas, eagerly provided by Clare’s competitors. Such alternatives did not clean as well; they were potentially even more harmful than phosphates. But the battle for public opinion was lost. By the early 1970s, Awe was history.
Hard on the heels of this blow came another, much more devastating. A shocked executive committee watched, helpless, as the Clare name began to be crucified on college campuses for a negligible contribution that its Agricultural Products Division made to a defoliant the Army used in Southeast Asia. No amount of public relations damage control seemed to make any difference.
The student protests polarized Lacewood. When Sawgak College turned out to picket the factory, the factory workers turned out to bloody the pickets. Bumper stickers, legible clothing, and posters chose their slogans like so many fifteen-second spots. A photo of naked children fleeing an air attack in terror read: “Clare: Making Your Life a Little Simpler.” A cartoon of a weed-smoking, fungus-garlanded hippie transformed into a clean-cut bank clerk declared: “A little defoliation never hurt anyone.” It seemed a wound the town might never recover from.
Shortly after the defoliant disaster, the courts ordered the company to hire more minorities. Recruiting officers already had a contingency plan in place. The forces that had for so long scoured the leading business schools for the best and brightest men now turned their attention toward locating women and blacks. Although they found some, and made their hires as visible as possible, the new recruits never went as far or stayed as long as their counterparts. Once again, Sawgak joined the nationwide protest, circulating fake bars of Snowdrop, the famous stamped name now reading “Lily-white.”
The Clare brass failed to fight this collapse in reputation, because it couldn’t comprehend it. The public had turned not just against Clare but against all industry and enterprise. Now that business had delivered people from far worse fates, people turned against the fate of business. Like the careless grantees in fairy tales, they forgot the force that freed them to complain in the first place.
But when OPEC’s cartel capped the world’s holiday font of oil, Clare stuck by Lacewood. When the Japanese expeditionary forces landed, able to make better versions of just about everything for less, Clare kept the town from the worst rust spreading across America from Pittsburgh to Denver.
The dollar began its slow turn toward the imaginary. The market fell apart. During the decade’s stately decline, Clare’s best play seemed to be to spin off unprofitable businesses to smaller companies who could manage them better. But the company held on to its profitable core, a core with a century and a half of expansion and know-how behind it.
The game seized up so gradually that no one could say whether the run was all over or only regrouping. Three short-lived chief executives tried to revitalize the corporate image. They scrounged about for something upbeat, something eighties. They launched new, clashing, tealand-grenadine-colored soaps and soap products. Now self-adjusting. Now with DNA. They hired popular androgynes to make thirty-second rock videos plugging their high-dose caffeinated water. They got four famous basketball players to fake pickup games with one another on film, paying this dream endorsement team half the salary of the entire Lacewood plant. They became the Official Redi-Wipe of the Olympics.
Nothing quite worked. Despondency descended upon the Boston HQ, a gloom that radiated outward to the divisional operations. Further growth seemed to depend on externalizing costs. In private, away from the water cooler, managers began to ask whether the late-day industry could really keep yielding interest, or whether it was just a pyramiding scheme that continued to work only so long as the world had a little more principal left to liquidate.
Despair traveled high up the food chain. The disenchanted, bright young Director of Holdings, whom many thought was being groomed for bigger things, quit the firm in 1983 to take a position at Harvard Business School. There he made a name for himself with a carefully worked-out theory that American business could work once and only once, with a blank continent in front of it to dispose of.
Franklin Kennibar, Sr., longtime SVP at Coke who was passed over for the ultimate promotion, came in to become Clare’s first outside CEO since founding. For a starting annual remuneration of two and a half million dollars plus incentives, he saved the company from despair with two words: “global,” and “green.”
Kennibar broke down Clare’s last vestiges of parochialism. He swept out the residual shirt-and-tie manufacturing mentality and replaced it with the new, aggressive blood of the raiding eighties. He knitted his executives into the emerging corporate elite, that inter-locking international membership whose directors all served on one another’s boards. He br
ought a new slogan to the twentieth floor of One Clare Plaza, a quote attributed to Locke: “Private vice makes public virtue.”
The most visible company head since Kenneth Waxman, Kennibar was born to stump. He lived for it, doing for the company what Nagel’s stable of artists and poets once did for the company’s products. He canvassed the country like the most tireless of candidates. Everywhere he went, from college commencement to charitable banquet, he gave some variation on what he called his Corporation Speech:
The corporation has been so debated, demeaned, and vilified that we have lost sight of what it has done . . . In fact, it is, without qualification, the most remarkable and successful invention in the history of democratic peoples . . .
Corporations pay for a quarter of public undertakings at all levels, provide half of all jobs, produce two thirds of all payroll, and an even greater proportion of total national wealth. In this century alone, corporations have generated the capital, invented the tools, marshaled the labor, and produced the machinery needed to win two world wars, curtail disease, extend the human life span, harness the atom, and put men on the moon . . .
The market cannot be “corrected.” It cannot be “wrong.” The market is just a chalk mark on a wall, a mark of what we want and how much we’re willing to do to get it . . .
The very notion of “consumer advocacy” is a well-meaning mistake, for there are as many consumer interests as there are consumers. Only by leaving consumer interests to the market have we managed the whole mind-boggling transformation of life since the days when Americans boiled dead animal scraps on an open hearth to make a little liquid soap.
The consumer’s best advocate is her own dollar, a franchise given her over every aspect of her existence. By scrambling to win consumer votes and avoid consumer censure, business becomes the best tool we have for building the world that people want.
Remember that business is not some autonomous machine, hell-bent on making us do its bidding. It is no more than a group of people, gathering their abilities together to meet the needs of other people, needs that could not be met by separate efforts . . .
Yes, the corporation’s goal is to raise the expectations of all humankind, to raise them to shameless, unmeetable levels. And then it must meet those expectations. Whatever we may yet achieve as individuals, the corporation will underwrite that achievement . . .
Kennibar’s internal corporate message was a more pointed variation on that theme. The world was still full of unfilled vistas. One simply had to look farther afield. The Philippines was awash with people who craved Clarity Pore Purifier. Isolated Indonesian villages swarmed the Clare Lady who came selling shampoo samples out of her motor-boat. Already Brazilian Partifest sales were growing twice as fast as North American. Eastern Europe had a hundred million young adults ready to swap their Trabis for a year’s supply of Compleet and Viva-cleanse. The Indian middle class would soon outstrip any in the world. In China alone, one billion people had never tasted fat-free fruit snacks made with real fruit. And by the time Clare filled all that map in, even Africa would be ready to provide additional new markets.
When the market crashed in October of ’87, Kennibar engineered a sizable stock buyback at bargain basement prices, strengthening management’s freedom of movement. And after the fall of Communism’s Wall in ’89, the “prophet of enterprise” could no longer fill all his speaking engagements. A revitalized Clare set up provisional shop in Moscow by the second quarter of ’91. A year later, it began bidding for factory site licenses in Vietnam, helping to replant the country it had once helped defoliate.
At the same time, the overseas campaigns led to new domestic savings. Ecuador offered startling tax incentives. Samoa, an unincorporated possession, sported several interesting legal benefits. Malaysian workers underbid American machines. All those advantages meant a cheaper, better product back home. More: it meant that “home” was everywhere. A company couldn’t afford to be bound emotionally to any one address.
But even the filled-in, exhausted American continent still had new frontiers. The trick was to continue delivering that next new lifestyle still struggling to be born. Once upon a time, good chemistry sufficed for good business. Then Clare expanded into the evolution line. For a long time, good business meant peddling a progressive sociology. At the end of the day, the business to beat became ecology.
Clare went green, inside and out. Internally, several factories instituted paper, glass, energy, wood, and plastic recovery cycles in their manufacturing processes, realizing savings of several millions.
Company-wide, energy use declined 30 percent in the five years following the oil crisis, twice the Department of Energy’s mandated goal. This performance then became the subject of ads all its own.
To the consumer, Clare sold ecology in all sizes. Brand managers built the extremely popular “Environomic” line. Their chemists came up with the first ever Environmentally Responsible polyurethane, marketed by an irresistible parrot who flew about the fume-free cans croaking, “Pretty Polly.” Clarity hair spray was among the first to dispense with CFCs. All Weather Gravel-Grippers, made with 15 percent post-consumer recycled materials, came with a “Save the Earth” bumper sticker.
This was Kennibar’s flash of saving genius: to see that anything—anything at all—could become good business. Business had to shed its every association, its every product and process and purpose in favor of another, better one. Green, too, was a need, the same as any that has faced the species. And nothing met human need better than concerted human industry.
As Wall Street binge-purged its way through a decade of junk bond, leveraged debt, shotgun merger, hostile buyout, bankruptcy, and overvalued start-ups, Clare, too, reequipped itself to play the radically changed game. The key lay in lifting the whole entrepreneurial cycle to ever-higher playing fields. Clare’s new merchant banking wizards built the financial portfolio, moved quickly, juggled their exposures, timed their strikes, and turned profits simply by taking the right trading risk at the right time.
The company increased its political profile. The new strategy for the times was not to fund either side of an election with the purpose of buying a victory. The idea was to spread the seed moneys, like a terrace of philanthropic grants, among all the contenders. That way, they supported whoever won.
Even as Clare Corporate built the war chest and played the paper-value game, it continued to make new things, or at least new packages. It introduced Solva, a laundry detergent for acid-rain-damaged clothes. It set up the Cow’s Common Farms subsidiary, to make and sell health foods to conscientious label-readers who would never have bought from a multinational conglomerate. It enjoyed huge success with a PVC-bottled, highly purified water.
And all the while, its chemists chipped away at the problem of material existence. Fats and oils had built the company. Clare had already driven them out from all detergents and many cleaning compounds. Now the company staked its future on replacing these evil esters all together. The day’s holy grail was the simplest thing in the world: something that behaved like fat, cooked like fat, smelled like fat, tasted like fat, but had none of fat’s sinister qualities. The substance—whose ultimate existence no chemist doubted for a minute—would join the calorie-free sugar, the cholesterol-free egg substitute, and the nondairy creamer to serve up all of the pleasures of eating with none of the consequences.
Clarene got its FDA approval in record time, during a period of economic jitters. In test markets, a small portion of users suffered severe cramping and diarrhea. Some rival scientists warned that the substance might have invisible long-term health effects, leaving the body susceptible to infection or worse. Never doubting that its chemists would eventually hammer out the kinks, Clare simply marked all Clarene-based foods with a warning label about limiting consumption, and pressed on with its biggest new food breakthrough of millennium’s end.
By the mid-1990s, before the spate of unrelated lawsuits hit, Clare was again a remarkable success story.
A Wall Street Journal poll listed it as one of the most admired corporations in America. It managed the combination of consumer and industrial enterprises with rare efficiency. Its clean balance sheet was a favorite with mutual fund managers and other institutional investors.
Clare brands continued to command a loyal client base. Its ads—assembled by three of the big ten agencies—provided the backbone of shared culture, from playground to dinner table. Adweek judged its healthy eating campaign, “Have a Good Meal,”™ to be one of the de -cade’s most recognized. Old Native Balm engravings now went for thousands of dollars at auctions. A novelization of a series of commercials for Clare’s leading over-the-counter painkiller ran for twelve weeks on the New York Times Book Review best seller list, and even made money as a film, if one counted its international and video releases.
On a brass plaque, darkened by air, at eye level just off to the right of the main doors:
The renovation of this hospital and the extensive modernization of its patient-care facilities were made possible by a gift from the Benjamin Clare Charitable Fund, established by Clare International.
The effects of this generosity upon our community will be lasting and incalculable.
George Garmon, M.D., Chairman, Mercy Foundation Hospital
Gerald S. Rawlings, Mayor of Lacewood
August 1978
Tim comes home from school to find her gasping. In that shortness of breath, a waking dream of live burial. Air will not enter her. Panic sucks her down into the black.
Tim rushes into her mouth to check for obstructions, just as the films say to. There are no obstructions. He calls his dad at work, who calls an ambulance. Just that quickly, Laura is back in the hospital.