Mary Kay Ash. In her office, Dallas, Texas, January 1982. Courtesy of AP Images.

Ash, Mary Kay (12 May 1918-22 Nov. 2001), founder of Mary Kay Cosmetics, known as Mary Kay, was born Mary Kathlyn Wagner in Hot Wells, Texas, north of Houston, the daughter of Edward Alexander Wagner, an invalid, and Lula Vember Hastings, a restaurant manager. Texas has no record of Mary Kathlyn Wagner's birth for 1918--the year she usually claimed--nor for 1916, the date cited second most often; she may have been born as early as 1915. By 1920, her family moved to Houston's bleak Sixth Ward.

When Mary Kay was about seven, her father returned home after four years in a tuberculosis sanatorium. Because her mother worked from 5 a.m. to 9 p.m. seven days a week, Mary Kay was put in charge of her bedridden father, the household, and herself. Coaching the little girl through the cooking, shopping, and chores, Lula would say, "You can do it, Mary Kay! You can do it!"--a statement that later became a famous "Mary Kay-ism" endlessly repeated to motivate the Mary Kay Cosmetics sales force. For the rest of her life, Mary Kay would cite Lula's crushing workload as an example of how unjust it was that even the hardest-working woman could not earn wages equal to a man's.

Mary Kay graduated from Houston's John H. Reagan High School, winning prizes as an orator, and she longed to attend college. Instead, in 1935, she married Ben Rogers, a gas-station attendant who also played with a local band called the Hawaiian Strummers. Unable to afford their own home, the newlyweds moved in with Mary Kay's mother. They later had three children: J. Ben, Marylyn, and Richard Raymond. During much of her marriage, Mary Kay was in effect a single mother, often supporting the family with commissions from various door-to-door sales jobs. Despite all that, Mary Kay eventually managed to save enough money to enroll at the University of Houston. During her first semester, Rogers who had served in World War II, returned in 1946 and requested a divorce, announcing that he'd had a years-long affair with another woman.

Humiliated, depressed, and virtually incapacitated by symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis, Mary Kay continued to toil in direct sales. After selling a variety of products door-to-door, she began work for the well-known Stanley Home Products in 1939. Although she was a small woman, ill-suited to lugging the heavy household cleaning product cases, she consistently won prizes for sales. Later she would adapt Stanley's home demonstrations and "house party" business model to her own company. However, even more influential upon her later endeavors was Stanley's ongoing refusal to promote her.

In 1952 she quit her job with Stanley and moved to Dallas to work for World Gift, where her sales record was so spectacular that one year she single-handedly increased company-wide sales by over 50 percent. Mary Kay was unstoppable: afflicted with a tic that distorted her face, she bought a pair of big sunglasses and kept selling for years until she could have the condition corrected. But at World Gift she also felt that history was repeating itself--that her abilities and hard work were being ignored because she was a woman. In 1963, when she was passed over for promotion in favor of a man whom she had trained, she quit in disgust.

Initially intending to retire and write a book about selling, Mary Kay soon decided that her book notes could be the recipe for the success of her own venture. She promptly acquired the skin care formulas developed by an Arkansas tanner named J. W. Heath, who had noticed that his hands stayed soft and wrinkle-free while he worked with hides. She spent $500 to get the formulas from Heath's daughter Ova Spoonemore--whom she had met years before during a Stanley Home Products party--and used the rest of her life savings of $5,000 to create a direct-selling company around them. In July 1963, with the company about to launch, Mary Kay married George Hallenbeck, who also hailed from the world of sales and who would be in charge of the new company's finances. But only a month into the marriage--and only a month before the company's launch date--Hallenbeck died of a heart attack. Mary Kay went full speed ahead with the company anyway, pressing her twenty-year-old son Richard into Hallenbeck's role and opening Beauty By Mary Kay for business on Friday, 13 September, in a five-hundred-square-foot Dallas storefront with only nine saleswomen signed up. She picked pink for her packaging.

Based on those Arkansas tanner's formulas, Mary Kay's five foundation products were Cleansing Cream for $2, Nite Cream for $4.95, Skin Freshener for $3.50, Day Radiance for $1.50, and Magic Masque for $4. Using the same "house party" model perfected by Stanley, Tupperware, and dozens of other mid-twentieth-century American companies, a Mary Kay representative would invite her friends over for free facials, then pitch the products.

For a female entrepreneur to found an empire on skin care was nothing new, even in 1963. As far back as the 1880s Harriet Hubbard Ayer had made a fortune pitching skin creams. Helena Rubinstein had used them to become the richest self-made woman in the world at the start of the twentieth century. Elizabeth Arden had traveled the same road to glory after founding her company in 1910, as had Estée Lauder when she began in the 1940s. The idea--then and now--was that a satisfied customer for skin care would eventually repeat the purchase and automatically become a potential customer for makeup and adjunct products.

Mary Kay was also far from the first to pitch cosmetics through direct sales. In 1886, the bible salesman David H. McConnell inadvertently founded Avon when he discovered that the perfume samples he gave away were more popular than his main product, whereupon he concentrated on cosmetics and hired a woman named Mrs. P. F. E. Albee to sell them for him. In the early twentieth century the African American entrepreneurs Annie Turnbo Malone of Poro hair care and Sarah Breedlove, known as Madame C. J. Walker, founded beauty empires in which they invoked racial pride, economic independence, and godliness while using earthly rewards like diamond jewelry as incentives for their top saleswomen.

But unlike Avon, where women were the majority of the sales force and the minority of the management, Mary Kay was a very visible, very active, and almost ridiculously feminine-looking role model: a God-fearing, hard-working, immaculately groomed mother of three who was doing everything within in her power to see other women get ahead, and who loved mentoring so much that she referred to her saleswomen as her "daughters." Also unlike Avon, Mary Kay made her saleswomen more profit per unit: a Mary Kay lipstick cost roughly double the price of an Avon lipstick and hence made twice the profit, while the home-party format meant that several customers could be approached at once. And unlike the businesses of Annie Turnbo Malone and Madame C. J. Walker, Mary Kay made her company purposely inclusive, enabling her rapid expansion into Australia, South America, Europe, and Asia.

Playing up her equal-pay-for-equal-work credo, Mary Kay tapped into the emotions of every woman who had ever been miserable, underpaid, or patronized. "Instead of a door marked For Men Only, our company opened its doors wide with welcome--especially for women," she said. In Mary Kay Cosmetics, every consultant paid a standard price for her starter products. If she recruited other consultants, she also received a small commission on everything they sold. Consultants who recruited other consultants were pushed further up the sales ladder, thereby motivating them to help women who followed them.

The recipe worked. Within months of its founding, Mary Kay's company was profitable. By year's end, she had hit $198,000 in sales. To celebrate, in 1964 the new entrepreneur staged her first sales convention, called "Seminar," in a warehouse decorated with balloons and catered with chicken and Jell-O salad that she had made herself. By the time of Mary Kay's death, Seminar had become an institution at the enormous Dallas Convention Center: an annual three-day, song-and-dance production comparable in cost and staging to the Academy Awards. Although every representative had to pay her own way to Dallas and also pay for a ticket, Seminar sold out so often that by the 1990s it was split into five identical editions (Pearl, Diamond, Sapphire, Ruby, and Emerald) run back-to-back for a yearly total of roughly thirty-five thousand attendees.

From the start, Seminars were emotional extravaganzas. Tears were shed. Vows were made. And in the midst of motivational films and fashion shows, new products were announced and women were very publicly promoted. During Seminar, Mary Kay rewarded her sales force with incentives like fur coats and foreign vacations, which she called "Cinderella gifts." In 1968, after ordering a pink Cadillac for her own use, Mary Kay realized that she had hit upon the most enduring Cinderella gift: by the next year, top performers were driving company-leased pink Cadillacs--or, as the program expanded, a pink Toyota in Taiwan, or a pink Mercedes in Germany. Other emblems included bumblebees--a symbol of determination since it was supposed to be aerodynamically impossible for any bumblebee to fly--and ladders, as a sign of the route to success. During Seminar, Mary Kay would also recite inspirational songs and intone her many motivational slogans--her famous "Mary Kay-isms"--such as:

"God first, family second, career third," often paraphrased as "God first, family second, Mary Kay third" and known as the company's "Golden Rule."
"P&L means People and Love."
"It's not where you start, it's where you finish."
"When you come to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on!"
"What do you have that you can't have fixed?"
"Fail forward to success."

Throughout its first decade Mary Kay Cosmetics had double-digit growth--sometimes as high as 30 or 40 percent--every year. In 1969, the company broke ground on its own manufacturing plant, an unusual move in a business mostly served by jobbers. By 1979, it topped $100 million, then proceeded to double that in less than a decade. Listing its first share in 1968, the company was traded on the New York Stock Exchange beginning in 1976. In 1985 Mary Kay bought back her company--much as Helena Rubinstein had done decades before--through a leveraged buyout, and by 1993 she was listed on the Forbes 500. In her business, success followed success. In 1993, on the company's thirtieth anniversary, she also opened the Mary Kay Museum near company headquarters in Addison, Texas, where the flashy gowns she wore during Seminar were preserved in vitrines on Mary Kay mannequins.

For years Mary Kay lived in a famously over-the-top nineteen-thousand-square-foot pink palace in North Dallas, where she would invite her top saleswomen and show them her crystal chandeliers and the huge player piano stocked with melodies by her friend Liberace. Otherwise her personal life was quiet. In 1966 Mary Kay married Melville Jerome Ash, "Mel," a retired salesman. After Ash died of cancer in 1980, Mary Kay added cancer research to the list of charities she endowed, and then she kept right on working. In 1994, she sold her pink palace and retreated to smaller quarters. Then in February 1996 the girl who had won prizes for oratory, the admitted workaholic, the best-known saleswoman in the world, suffered a stroke that left her unable to speak or leave her house.

Mary Kay died in North Dallas, leaving a personal fortune estimated at $98 million, more than two-thirds of it in company stock. At that time her company had more than $1.2 billion in sales and an international sales force of more than eight hundred thousand in at least three dozen countries.

Mary Kay Ash wrote a best-selling life story, Mary Kay (1981); a management primer that makes ample use of autobiography, Mary Kay on People Management (1984); a self-help book, Mary Kay, You Can Have It All: Lifetime Wisdom from America's Foremost Woman Entrepreneur (1995); and the posthumously published Miracles Happen: The Life and Timeless Principles of the Founder of Mary Kay, Inc. (2003). When telling her own story she tended to gloss over bits of biography that are unglamorous or off-message, and she was disingenuous about dates. For that reason most of the journalism about Mary Kay and her company is unintentionally inaccurate. Among the best journalism is Morley Safer's 1979 segment entitled "The Pink Panther," 60 Minutes, CBS News, and Skip Hollandsworth, "Hostile Makeover," Texas Monthly, Nov. 1995. Hollandsworth's article inspired the 2002 CBS television film Hell on Heels: The Battle of Mary Kay, starring Shirley MacLaine. Mary Kay's life and the history of her company are considered in the context of other direct-selling ventures in Mary Lisa Gavenas, Color Stories: Behind the Scenes of America's Billion-Dollar Beauty Industry (2002). Mary Kay is the only woman featured in Daniel Gross, Forbes Greatest Business Stories of All Time (1996).