<\/p>\n
Mary Kay with her pink 1986 Fleetwood Cadillac.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Mary Kay archives<\/p>\n
Mary Kay Ash<\/a> is a woman easily recognized but rarely known. With her gauzy pink gowns and platinum blond wig, she can be pretty campy: The makeup she wore like a mask, the dogs she toted around like babies, the pink Cadillacs that roared onto the stage at motivational seminars for top consultants. \u00a0<\/p>\n Selling Opportunity, an absorbing new biography by former Glamour editor\u00a0Mary Lisa Gavenas, rescues the Dallas cosmetics giant from the tomb of kitsch and lore. We watch as the girl born Mary Kathlyn Wagner in Hot Wells, Texas, in 1918 \u2014 fourth child to poor parents, a high achiever who graduated high school at 16 and won second-best typist in Houston \u2014 transforms into the first woman to chair a company on the New York Stock Exchange and a female empowerment figure on par with\u00a0Oprah<\/a>. \u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Much of what we know about Mary Kay comes from the woman herself, prone to tall tales and romantic hyperbole in the bestselling memoirs that doubled as self-help manuals. Gavenas peels back the ruffly layers of mythology to reveal a woman who is enterprising, tireless, gracious \u2014 but also isolated by her success and trapped in a persona. Still, Mary Kay emerges as an American original, one of Texas\u2019\u00a0grande dames and a girlboss (ladyboss?) way ahead of her time. \u00a0<\/p>\n Here are a few of the book\u2019s takeaways. \u00a0<\/p>\n As a young mother, Mary Kay was a top seller for Stanley Home Products, left, and later ran a billion-dollar empire (right, pictured with her poodle Gigi).<\/p>\n Mary Kay wasn\u2019t the first to give away pink Cadillacs\u00a0<\/p>\n Mary Kay became a singular figure, but she was riffing on ideas in the culture at the time. She launched her direct-sales company in 1963 with motivational traditions borrowed from Stanley Home Products, the cleaning supply company where she plied her trade. Her friend Mary\u00a0C. Crowley (mother of Don Carter<\/a>, who brought the Dallas Mavericks to town) had already launched a direct-sales outfit called Home Interiors and Gifts, where prizes included fur-lined checkbook covers and one slogan was \u201cThink mink,\u201d just a letter removed from Mary Kay\u2019s famous \u201cThink pink.\u201d Crowley also gave away Cadillacs to top sellers. \u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Make Dallas News a preferred source so your search results prioritize writing by actual people, not AI.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Add Preferred Source<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Most surprising is that even pink Cadillacs as sales incentives didn\u2019t originate with Mary Kay. In 1952, Brownie Wise was given a pink Cadillac by inventor Earl\u00a0Tupper, whose Tupperware products she turned into a phenomenon. Wise is a mostly forgotten figure, but the divorced single mother reconfigured direct sales, once the domain of men going door-to-door, into a \u201cparty-plan\u201d system for wives and mothers, a model on which Mary Kay built an empire. \u00a0<\/p>\n Mary Kay was likely channeling Wise when she bought a shiny new 1968 Cadillac DeVille, custom-colored in pale pink, to celebrate the first few years of her successful cosmetics company. The 19-foot pastel behemoth was so eye-catching that her sales force started buying them, too, and Mary Kay hit upon the perfect incentive prize, which also became one of the most famous marketing tools of the late 20th century.\u00a0<\/p>\n Beauty empires can get ugly\u00a0<\/p>\n Mary Kay may have borrowed from other direct-sales companies, but she didn\u2019t respond well when a former employer borrowed from her. After top seller Jackie Brown left Mary Kay to start rival BeautiControl in 1966, Mary Kay sued Brown, who sued her right back. \u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n The fight dragged on for years, ending in a draw, but BeautiControl continued to plague Mary Kay into the ’90s, leading to a battle of beauty empires captured in\u00a0Skip <\/a>Hollandsworth<\/a>\u2019s juicy \u201cHostile Makeover<\/a>\u201d in Texas Monthly and the 2002 movie it inspired, Hell on Heels, starring Parker Posey as the brash new head of BeautiControl and Shirley MacLaine as the unsinkable cosmetics queen. \u00a0<\/p>\n The new Mary Kay pink Cadillac XT6 at the beauty brand’s convention Friday, July 19, 2019 in Dallas.\u00a0<\/p>\n Ryan Michalesko\/Dallas Morning News<\/p>\n Mary Kay was married six times\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n The company line on Mary Kay is that she had three husbands. Actually, she had six, a detail she kept so well hidden that The New York Times obituary <\/a>after her death in 2001, at 83, got it wrong. \u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Marriage is a category where Mary Kay\u2019s eternal optimism might have worked against her. At 16, she ran off with a handsome, feckless radio personality named Ben Rogers, with whom she had three children. She was divorced by 28, when she married her 55-year-old boss at Stanley Home Products, who died of a heart attack within a year. That tragedy repeated itself in the ’60s when husband number five, a salesman named George\u00a0Hallenbeck, died of a heart attack after a morning jog. By 46, she\u2019d been widowed twice.\u00a0<\/p>\n In between, there was husband number three, Al Miller, who didn\u2019t bother to show up in court when she divorced him, and husband number four, Charles Weaver, the unambitious brother of her wildly ambitious friend and mentor, Mary C. Crowley.\u00a0<\/p>\n Her final husband was Mel Ash, the charmer she married in 1966, and the two gave the appearance of a happy courtship until his death in 1980, although \u201cappearance\u201d is a pivotal word with Mary Kay. According to the book, she loved to spin dramatic fables about how Mel gave her a Hallmark card every Thursday and showered her with jewelry. (If he did, she paid, because Mel had no job.) \u00a0<\/p>\n To be an ambitious, driven woman in the corset of ’60s gender roles was no easy feat. When the couple commissioned architect Frank\u00a0L. Meier to build an eccentric round house near Preston Hollow, Mary Kay\u00a0\u2014 who called every shot\u00a0\u2014 would ask Meier to placate her husband. \u201cMake him feel like he\u2019s a big part of this,\u201d she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Mary Kay understood people \u00a0<\/p>\n By the end of her life, Mary Kay sat atop a billion-dollar company with a global reach, despite having no head for numbers. What she understood was people. They want to feel special. They want to believe in dreams, whether that\u2019s a pearly lotion that could reverse Father Time or a side hustle that could allow a cash-strapped mother to balance work and home life while chasing the promise of a brand new car.\u00a0<\/p>\n Is Mary Kay a scam? Gavenas doesn\u2019t give much ink to the idea, since the company buys back 90% of unsold merchandise, but the internet has no shortage of disgruntled employees bad-mouthing the company. \u00a0<\/p>\n Mary Kay weathered the criticism with grace and the Teflon exterior of a born saleswoman. When Bloom County cartoonist Berkeley Breathed turned Mary Kay into a recurring villain in a cartoon strip\u00a0\u2014 eventually putting out a book called The Night of the Mary Kay Commandos \u2014 she sent him a thank-you note.\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Mary Kay Ash in her pink bathroom, 1989.<\/p>\n Erich Schlegel\/Dallas Morning News<\/p>\n Mary Kay is kind of an emotional black box\u00a0<\/p>\n The museum constructed inside Mary Kay headquarters<\/a>, with mannequins of the bewigged founder in luxury gowns, turns out to be a good approximation for the woman: polished, immovable, unknowable. In 1984, she built a lavish pink home<\/a> in Preston Hollow whose pink bathroom had pink toilet paper and sinks made from pink quartz carved by the same guy who did Liberace\u2019s bathroom. Pink wasn’t even her favorite color.<\/p>\n By signing up, you agree to our Terms Of Use<\/a> and acknowledge that your information will be used as described in our Privacy Policy<\/a>.<\/p>\n She was trapped in a brand, in a persona. \u201cShe hated that house,\u201d said a friend and top sales associate. Why did she build it? Unclear. There\u2019s a lot about Mary Kay\u2019s interior life that remains a black box, and I don\u2019t think that\u2019s a limitation of Gavenas’ book\u00a0so much as a reflection of the woman who prided herself on presentation. She was all exterior. She was always selling.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
![\"image\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/1775016909_917_rawImage.jpg\" "\\"#\\"")
<\/p>\n