‘Life of the Party’ by Bob Kealing

One of the writing groups of which I am a very happy member recently set us the task of writing short pieces that contained a variety of unrelated words. These were ancient, lioness, tapestry, trivial, auntie and Tupperware. The first five posed no problem at all, but Tupperware? That threw me. I should perhaps have done what a fellow group member did and simply avoid integrating it in any serious way by cleverly including as an aside that ‘this was, of course long before Tupperware had been invented’. Instead I decided to turn necessity into some kind of virtue by writing about Tupperware which I soon discovered is a product with a fascinating history.

The company recently filed for bankruptcy in America, but through the second half of the twentieth century it was terrifically successful, it being reported in the 1960s that over 90% of American households had at least one item from its range in the kitchen.

The company’s success was largely due to the efforts of two people who really did not get on so well for much of the time. Earl Tupper, a former tree surgeon from Massacheusetts was the company chairman. He invented the material in the 1940s and had an enviable flare for design, but was not a skilled sales person. So he focused on the manufacturing side, while he employed an extraordinary woman called Brownie Wise (named after her big wide eyes) to lead the sales and marketing side. This she did with astonishing energy and success, mainly by pioneering promotion via Tupperware parties in people’s houses. She recruited sales people, mostly housewives, from around the USA to run the parties in exchange for a significant cut of the income they generated.

This book is a biography of Mrs Wise, a single mother from Detroit who was by 1958, thanks to a gift for self-promotion, the most famous and recognisable American businesswoman. She made a great deal of money and spent it conspicuously, holding lavish sakes conventions in her mansion. Eventually she overstretched when she held a big social gathering for her reps on an island in the middle of a lake without checking the weather forecast first. It was a hot Florida summers day and a storm blew up, soaking everyone and making the choppy journey back to the shoreline pretty frightening. Soon afterwards, although it was all dressed up as a voluntary move, she was effectively sacked by Earl Tupper. Later attempts to establish a cosmetics brand never really took off, and she sadly died in 1992 in some obscurity, having cruelly been edited out of official company histories.

This book is more about her than Tupperware and is heavily biased in her favour when telling the story, but I read it alongside chunks of another more balanced book (Tupperware: the promise of Plastic in 1950s America’ by Alison J Clarke) to get the full picture and all the information I needed to write my little piece.

I enjoyed Bob Kealing’s book greatly. Business biographies are often ‘authorised’ and amount to sanitised PR about their subjects. This one is very pro-Brownie, but it does not edit out her less pleasant features. Informative, readable and fun.