Estée Lauder: "When you stop talking, you've lost a customer. When you turn your back, you've lost her." (Image by Bill Sauro.)

Estée Lauder’s cosmetics empire was built more on her makeup as a person than on the kind that’s applied to faces. Raised in Queens, Lauder simply outhustled everyone in her field and never grew complacent. She provides the personal touch for a customer in this great 1966 picture by World Journal Tribune photographer William Sauro. (Sauro had already won the George Polk Memorial Award for his amazing shot of Helen Keller “listening” to Eleanor Roosevelt with her fingertips; he would subsequently work for the New York Times for the last three decades of his career.)

An excerpt from Grace Mirabella’s 1998 Time article about Lauder, on the occasion of her being the only woman selected for the magazine’s list of 20th-century business geniuses:

“You more or less know the Estée Lauder story because it’s a chapter from the book of American business folklore. In short, Josephine Esther Mentzer, daughter of immigrants, lived above her father’s hardware store in Corona, a section of Queens in New York City. She started her enterprise by selling skin creams concocted by her uncle, a chemist, in beauty shops, beach clubs and resorts.

No doubt the potions were good–Estée Lauder was a quality fanatic–but the saleslady was better. Much better. And she simply outworked everyone else in the cosmetics industry. She stalked the bosses of New York City department stores until she got some counter space at Saks Fifth Avenue in 1948. And once in that space, she utilized a personal selling approach that proved as potent as the promise of her skin regimens and perfumes.

‘Ambition.’ Ask Leonard for one defining word about his mother, and that’s his choice.”