Roadwork Next 400 Years
Copyright © 2004 The New Yorker Magazine
Tuesday, July 27, 2004
A Mascara Call
In another life, I spent nearly 20 years blowing a whistle and wearing a striped shirt. I officiated (at least, that what I called it) high school basketball with a few college game in the mix. Of course, the harshest critics of a referee are coaches. I remember one coach screaming at me that I had missed a call (in his team's favor, of course). Then, when I blew my whistle and made a call that went against the other team, that coach screamed: "That's a mascara call!" In other words, I was attempting to make up to the first coach with a compensatory call. At least, the goofball didn't call me Estée Lauder, Helena Rubinstein, Elizabeth Arden. If this is (fair & balanced) cosmetology, so be it.
[x City Journal]
The Czarinas of Beauty
Stefan Kanfer
We do everything alike. . . .
We walk alike
We talk alike
And what is more we hate each other very much. . . .
How I wish I had a gun,
A little gun.
It would be fun
To shoot the other two and be only one!
“Triplets,” from The Bandwagon, by Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz
The founders of the beauty business were three self-styled czarinas who built their castles in New York City. Here, each professed to be very different from (and, of course, far superior to) her rivals. Actually, they bore such an extraordinary resemblance to one another that they might have emerged from a modern gothic novel, concocted by a singularly imaginative author.
The late Estée Lauder, who died this April at 97, was a short, hyper-ambitious, social-climbing saleswoman who loved wealth, invented her past, dumped her husband when he seemed a drag on her career, peddled emollients and powders that promised eternal youth, and dined out on her aphorisms. Among the most memorable: “Beauty is the will to be beautiful.”
Helena Rubinstein, who passed on in 1965 at 94, was a short, hyper-ambitious, social-climbing saleswoman who loved wealth, invented her past, dumped her husband when he seemed a drag on her career, peddled emollients and powders that promised eternal youth, and dined out on her aphorisms. Among the most memorable: “There are no ugly women, only lazy ones.”
Elizabeth Arden, who died in 1966 at 85, was a short, hyper-ambitious saleswoman who loved wealth, invented her past, dumped her husband when he seemed a drag on her career, peddled emollients and powders that promised eternal youth, and dined out on her aphorisms. Among the most memorable: “Nothing that costs only a dollar is worth having.”
Arden’s greatest invention was herself. Born Florence Nightingale Graham in a rural Canadian village in 1881, she helped support her four siblings and widowed father by peddling household supplies to local farmers. In 1907, she emigrated to New York and got herself a job at a Fifth Avenue beauty salon, catering to wealthy clients.
Joining forces with an equally determined woman, Graham opened a salon on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, near Sherry’s and Delmonico’s restaurants, and not far from Bergdorf Goodman’s fashionable clothing emporium. Facials came at $2 per, with the bonus of “six treatments for $10.00.” Though the salon turned an impressive profit, the partnership lasted less than a year—Florence wasn’t cut out to share earnings with anyone. Once on her own, the first thing she did was change her moniker: Elizabeth sounded queenly, and Arden was the romantic forest in which Shakespearean lovers gamboled. The second thing she did was paint the door of her Fifth Avenue salon red. The color remains to this day.
Arden married Tommy Jenkins Lewis in 1915. He spent the next four years in Europe as an army officer in World War I. When he returned, he became part of Arden’s burgeoning company but had rather less success as a husband. His usefulness ended in the 1920s, when “Miss Arden,” as all employees were to address her, made her big move. She began to advertise her products with a WASP elegance, promising that the step-by-step process—cleanse, tone, and moisturize—was an entryway to wealth and a productive marriage, and a moat to keep age and time at bay.
Arden enjoyed a virtual monopoly on high-end cosmetics until the epochal day when she found an interloper treading on her turf. In War Paint, the diverting double biography of Arden and her closest rival, author Lindy Woodhead describes the clash of titans. “Elizabeth Arden was like the Queen of America. Then suddenly here comes Helena Rubinstein from Europe, making a big noise and—absolutely indisputable fact—Arden was good at promotion, but Rubinstein was even better.” She proved better still at markup. It hardly mattered that some of her cosmetics cost but pennies to make; it was the promise of glamour that put them across. Indeed, when Rubinstein launched a product called Ultra Feminine Face Cream, it bombed. Asked why it wasn’t moving off the shelves, she replied gloomily, “Not expensive enough.” She would not repeat the mistake.
Helena—the Madame, as employees were to call her—had started her long rise in Australia. She arrived there from Kraków with no money and less English. She did, however, possess a fine complexion, and this was the foundation of her fortune.
The young émigré began by packaging and peddling lanolin—sheep oil—disguising the odor with extracts of lavender, pine bark, and water lilies. That mixture was a hit around Melbourne, giving her the impetus to open a salon in 1903. Two years later, she moved to Western Europe, determined to dominate the continent. Settling in Paris, she sold her merchandise to the haute monde, and cultivated people who could do her some good. Helena became famous for lavish dinner parties, where she let loose some memorable statements. At one fete, a drunken French ambassador turned on Edith Sitwell and her brother Sacheverell: “Vos ancêstres ont brûlée Jeanne d’Arc!” For all her business intelligence, the hostess spoke almost no French. “What did he say?” she asked a guest. “He said, ‘Your ancestors burned Joan of Arc.’ ” Replied Rubinstein, “Well, somebody had to do it.” On another occasion, Marcel Proust, who had heard of the Madame’s connections, tried to consult her about the makeup that a duchess might wear. She blew him off. “He smelt of mothballs,” was her defense. “How was I to know he was going to be famous?”
The Madame first married Edward Titus, a sometime journalist and publisher, who turned out to be quite useful for writing publicity releases and for fathering her two sons. But after the Rubinstein cosmetic line caught on, she would no longer tolerate his once-overlooked infidelities. He was summarily let go, unmissed when the Madame relocated to New York to take on Arden in the glamour wars.
During that war, she flummoxed some savvy Wall Street speculators who thought to get the better of her. In 1928, she sold her American business to Lehman Brothers at a profit of $7.3 million, in the days when you could keep it. Came the Depression, she took the company off their hands, repurchasing the nearly worthless stock for a little over $1 million. She then rode the shares into the stratosphere, opening various beauty salons and outlets in Boston, Newark, Newport, Atlantic City, Chicago, San Francisco, Palm Beach, Miami, Southampton, and Detroit. She also acquired a second husband in 1938. Artchil Gourielli-Tchkonia, 23 years her junior, claimed to be a Russian prince. Whether he was or not, he became the raison d’être for the Madame’s men’s line of Gourielli aftershave balm and talc. Some called the marriage a marketing ploy.
All the while, Rubinstein and Arden kept up a public feud—an echo of the mock battle that Jack Benny and Fred Allen waged in their wildly popular radio comedies. Thanks to her marriage, Helena passed herself off as royalty, a move that galled the ultra-snobbish Arden. Elizabeth got some measure of revenge when Clare Boothe Luce’s malicious and witty The Women opened on Broadway and then became a hit movie in 1939. The opening scene takes place in a high-end beauty salon, clearly based on Arden’s flagship locale at 673 Fifth Avenue; the beautiful vixens in the film reminded insiders of Arden’s soignée clientele—and this despite the Madame’s new spa only a few blocks north at 715 Fifth Avenue, boasting a restaurant, a gymnasium, and rugs by Joan Miró. Nevertheless, Luce bypassed it in her drama, well aware that the best dish of the day was served behind Arden’s now-famous red door.
The battle of the cosmetic divas was good for business, but the ladies truly did loathe each other. Hardly a month went by when they didn’t engage in a duel by checkbook. If Rubinstein commissioned Salvador Dalí to design a compact, Arden would order a mural from Georgia O’Keeffe for one of her fitness studios. If the Madame acquired a new Picasso, Arden would buy a few more thoroughbreds for her Kentucky stable, demanding that handlers wash the stalls with her best-selling fragrance, Blue Grass. The steeds themselves benefited from daily massages with her skin-care sensation, Eight Hour Cream, though with what result the Racing Form does not say.
As the years went on, the battles intensified. Arden stole Rubinstein’s sales director; Rubinstein hired Arden’s ex. Reconciliation between these two egos became unthinkable.
As for Estée Lauder, she too was her own best invention. “Mine is hardly a rags-to-riches story,” she claimed. But that is precisely what it was. The daughter of Hungarian Jewish immigrants was born Josephine Esther Mentzer in Queens in 1907, though she liked to boast of a childhood surrounded by servants and allowed rumors to circulate that she was from an old Catholic family. Her father Abraham was the proprietor, in turn, of an agricultural supply shop, a cemetery, and a hardware store. Working in the hardware store, Esther learned how to wrap goods attractively; from her uncle John, she gained some insights about the science of cosmetics by watching him cook up face creams and toothache drops on the kitchen stove. Particularly fascinated by one of his skin lotions, she dubbed it “Super-Rich All-Purpose Crème” and helped him sell it to neighbors.
She reinvented herself in 1925 as Estella Mentzer, and again in 1930, when she married Joseph Lauder, himself the son of Austrian immigrants. Nine years and one son later, the marriage failed. Estée (by that time) had learned a lot about self-promotion by watching Arden and Rubinstein from afar. She concluded that the speediest way to rise in her chosen field was to marry a millionaire. Alas, the interested ones weren’t available, and the available ones weren’t interested. After a long, discouraging period, she asked a friend, “What am I knocking myself out for with guys? Joe’s a nice man.” And so in 1942, three years after the split, the couple remarried and had another son.
For 15 years the business remained small. There were Estée, her sons, a daughter-in-law, and a receptionist-secretary. “When people asked for the order department,” her son Leonard recently recalled, “my wife put them on hold, came back with a disguised voice and said, ‘This is the order department.’ ” He added, “Success perceived becomes simply success.”
True enough. Yet Lauder rose less on smoke than on mirrors. More attractive than her rivals—Arden possessed a pleasant but undistinguished face, while Rubinstein in her later years resembled a terrapin—Estée made her work a personal business. She dropped in at beauty parlors, showing off her perfect complexion, hawking her products away from the standard retail outlets, as if intended only for the privileged few. She was always glad to show potential clients how to apply cream and powders, and did free-of-charge makeovers for anyone with the patience to hear her spiel. These were ingenious tactics that created an atmosphere of intimacy—and produced an ultimate irony. The stuff she carried from salon to salon attracted the attention of retail stores, which soon wanted in on the Estée Lauder line. Bergdorf Goodman was her first big catch; other major emporia followed.
This triumph led her to think bigger. To push the products, she invented gift-with-purchase promotions that brought even more customers into the tent. Then she turned to Europe. Overseas markets were notoriously tough for Americans to crack; to Estée, this was just another pebble in the shoe. She went to the Galeries Lafayette in Paris, for example, and found herself promptly snubbed by the perfume buyer. No matter; she spoke to a salesgirl and, while showing her the fragrance, somehow managed to spill some. The buyer inhaled the scent as he passed the counter and heard customers asking about it. Whether those customers were plants or real buyers, the “accident” had its desired effect. “We opened in France soon afterward,” Lauder’s memoir drily recalls.
Like the other two czarinas, Estée became a woman of enormous wealth, with houses in Manhattan and overseas. But unlike them, she passed her holdings on to the next generations. Rubinstein’s business changed hands two decades ago, and even her famous art collection went on the auction block. Although the scarlet door still decorates the Fifth Avenue locale of Elizabeth Arden, the company was sold in 1988. By contrast, the Estée Lauder Company remains a family affair. Estée’s son Ronald, once a New York gubernatorial candidate, stayed with the company until his retirement. His brother, Leonard, who would deliver the cosmetics by bicycle in the early days, is the company’s chairman, but will give way to his son William this summer.
Even in this time of Botox and collagen, implants and liposuction, the cosmetics industry still grossed some $60 billion last year and shows no signs of letting up. The siren appeal of a product off the shelves, a concoction that can diminish wrinkles, revive the skin, lighten the smile, and banish the years, remains as irresistible now as it did when Miss Arden, the Madame, and Estée Lauder first worked their magic. Such conditions will probably not change much in the new millennium, because humanity is unlikely to abandon its desire for self-improvement at minimum risk. In their heyday, the three ladies in question would hear many a put-down for selling superficial allure. After all, critics reminded their readers, beauty is only skin-deep. Playwright Jean Kerr spoke for cosmeticians around the world when she retorted, “I’m tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That’s deep enough. What do you want—an adorable pancreas?” That remains the deep-seated belief of most consumers, thanks to the efforts of those vanished pioneers, who still throw a long shadow across the city and the world, a trio with whims of iron and the talent for selling dreams in bottles and jars.
Stefan Kanfer is a contributing editor of City Journal and a former editor of Time. The most recent of his many books is Ball of Fire: The Tumultuous Life and Comic Art of Lucille Ball.
Copyright © 2004 The Manhattan Institute
Our Problematic Ally
Michael Moore's film—"Fahrenheit 9/11"—makes much of the connection between the Bush family and the Saudi royal family. In fact, when Moore was filming across the street from the Saudi embassy in Washington DC, he and his crew were accosted by Secret Service agents. Why in hell is the United States Secret Service performing police tasks for the Saudi government? Gerald Posner wrote a very disturbing book—Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11—and he hasn't stopped raising my hackles. If this is (fair & balanced) disillusionment with the 9/11 Commission, so be it.
[x The New York Times]
Scrutinizing the Saudi Connection
By GERALD POSNER
In establishing how the government failed to prevent the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, the 9/11 Commission Report is excellent. Its grasp of some details, however, is less than reassuring - particularly details about Saudi Arabia, which it calls, in a gross understatement, "a problematic ally in combating Islamic extremism."
Perhaps even more startling is the report's conclusion that the panel has "found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually" helped to finance Al Qaeda. It does say that unnamed wealthy Saudi sympathizers, and leading Saudi charities, sent money to the terror group. But the report fails to mine any of the widely available reporting and research that establishes the degree to which many of the suspect charities cited by the United States are controlled directly by the Saudi government or some of its ministers.
The report makes no mention, for example, of an October 2002 study by the Council of Foreign Relations that draws opposite conclusions about the role of Saudi charities and how "Saudi officials have turned a blind eye to this problem." The 9/11 panel also misses an opportunity to more fully explore an intelligence coup in 2002, when American agents in Bosnia retrieved computer files of the so-called Golden Chain, a group of Mr. bin Laden's early financial supporters.
Reported to be among the 20 names on this list were a former government minister in Saudi Arabia, three billionaire banking tycoons and several top industrialists. Yet the report neither confirms nor denies this. Nor does it address what, if anything, the Saudis did with the information, or whether the men were ever arrested by Saudi authorities.
These failures are ones of omission, but the questions are of vital significance. Less important, perhaps, but more well known is the story of how many prominent Saudis, including members of the bin Laden family, were able to fly out of the United States within days of 9/11.
On Sept. 13, 2001, a private jet flew from Tampa, Fla., to Lexington, Ky., before leaving the country later that same day. On board were top Saudi businessmen and members of the royal family. The assertion is that they were afforded extraordinary treatment since they flew out after the most cursory F.B.I. checks and at a time when American airspace was still closed to private aviation.
For a long time, the White House, the Federal Aviation Administration and the F.B.I. denied that any such flights had taken place on the 13th, and the first day of travel was the 14th. Now the report of the 9/11 Commission finally admits the flight was on the 13th - but it fails to quell the controversy. Rather, the report says the flight only took off "after national airspace was open" and quotes the pilot saying there was "nothing unusual whatsoever" about that flight.
The report fails, however, to note that when the flights occurred, airspace was open only to a limited number of commercial - not private - planes. And it attributes incorrect positions maintained for months by the federal government, particularly the F.B.I., to a "misunderstanding" between federal and local law enforcement.
Moreover, the report makes no effort to determine whether the question of the special repatriation of high-ranking Saudis from the United States was discussed on the same day as the first flight in a private meeting - no aides permitted - between President Bush and the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan. The ambassador has denied that the subject was discussed in his conversation with the president. But did the commission ask the president about it when it had the opportunity to question him? If so, there is no indication in the report.
The report makes no mention that one of the Saudis on the flight that left Kentucky for Saudi Arabia was Prince Ahmed bin Salman. Nephew to King Fahd, Prince Ahmed was later mentioned to American interrogators in March 2002 by none other than Abu Zubaydah, a top Qaeda official captured that same month. The connection, if any, between a top operative of Al Qaeda and a leading member of the royal family has remained unresolved despite Saudi denials. Prince Ahmed cannot be asked: he died in 2002, at the age of 43, from complications from stomach surgery in a Riyadh hospital.
Not only does the 9/11 report fail to resolve the matter of whether Mr. Zubaydah - who featured prominently in the now infamous Presidential Daily Briefing of Aug. 6, 2001 - was telling the truth when he named Prince Ahmed and several other princes as his contacts, but they do not even mention the prince in the entire report. The report does have seven references to Mr. Zubaydah's interrogations, yet not a single one is from March, the month of his capture, and the time he made his startling and still unproven accusations about high-ranking Saudi royals.
Of course, none of these matters undermine the report's central conclusions about what went wrong inside the United States leading up to 9/11. And satisfying answers to questions about the relationship between the Saudis and Al Qaeda might not be available yet. But the commission could have at least asked them. By failing to address adequately how Saudi leaders helped Al Qaeda flourish, the commission has risked damaging its otherwise good work.
Gerald Posner, the author of Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11, is writing a book about the Saudi royal family.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
50 Years Of Soul
The best of the Motown stable of performers were the four men known as the Four Tops. During the summer of 1965, I remember hearing "I Can't Help Myself" played over and over by some custodians where I also was working as a custodian. I had just earned an MA in history and the best job I could find was working a split shift as a custodian in the student union building at Eastern New Mexico University (ENMU). During my morning stint beginning at 4:00 AM, the other custodians played the jukebox (without depositing any coins) and the Four Tops singing their #1 hit filled the empty building. Whenever I hear that song, I go back in time. If this is (fair & balanced) nostalgia, so be it.
[x The New York Times]
Still Standing in the Shadows of Motown
By MICHELINE MAYNARD
Today's Four Tops: From left to right, Renaldo Benson, Theo Peoples, Ronnie McNair and Abdul Fakir at the Stardust Hotel in Las Vegas.
DETROIT, July 24 — Inside the tiny house where Motown Records began, Abdul Fakir is standing in famed Studio A, pointing out the worn spots on the floor where he and other members of the Four Tops stood when cutting their records.
He gestures to the sound booth, where the songwriters Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier and Eddie Holland sat, tweaking their arrangements. Motown's founder, Berry Gordy, stayed in his office upstairs in a house next door. But Mr. Gordy could hear the session through the walls. "If he came down, you had a hit," recalled Mr. Fakir, known as Duke.
On a day last month, a group of tourists descends the stairs. They fill the small studio, now part of the Motown Historical Museum, clamoring for autographs. Eulalio Brown of Port Huron, Mich., awaits his moment. Posing for a picture with Mr. Fakir, Mr. Brown, who claims a collection of Motown records "as big as Motown itself," is asked what set the Four Tops apart. "Longevity," he says, noting their five decades as recording artists.
Yet time has ravaged the Tops, too. Half the group no longer performs, including Levi Stubbs, whose gravelly voice was the signature of almost every song. Younger replacements have felt the sting of audiences who wanted nothing to change. Hits are scarce, too: the last was 15 years ago.
But while other groups of their era have broken up or been relegated to county fairs, the Tops still draw crowds to summer amphitheaters, where they crisply perform classics like "Standing in the Shadows of Love," as well as jazz tunes and fresh pop material.
And while the group is split on whether to continue if another original member can't go on, the Tops aren't packing up their sequined tuxedos just yet. On Wednesday, the group marks its 50th anniversary at a concert here that is being taped as their first television special.
Lifelong friends like Aretha Franklin and Mary Wilson, an original Supreme, will be on hand at the Detroit Opera House, honoring the group that was formed after its four original members, then high school students, met at a party in 1954.
Mr. Fakir, 68, will join Renaldo Benson, known as Obie, who is also 68, along with the two newest Tops, Ronnie McNair, 54, and Theo Peoples, 43. Mr. Peoples, formerly of the Temptations, will take on the parts sung by Mr. Stubbs, who stopped singing four years ago, felled by ill heath.
Now confined to a wheelchair, Mr. Stubbs, who declined to be interviewed, last appeared in public in April, at a benefit in Detroit.
The other original Top, Lawrence Payton, died in 1997. Their absence makes the anniversary bittersweet. "It's like having one body with two limbs missing," Mr. Benson said over a lobster lunch last month in a downtown Detroit restaurant.
Original members, clockwise from top left, Renaldo Benson, Abdul Fakir, Lawrence Payton and Levi Stubbs.
Not that the new members have had it easy. Mr. Peoples, the youngest Top, watched fans walk out of concerts when they discovered that he, not Mr. Stubbs, was singing lead. Not that he blamed them. "They're loyal fans of Levi's," Mr. Peoples said. "I can't take that as an insult."
The Tops frequently team up with Mr. Peoples's former group, the Temptations, with whom they first sang on Motown's 25th-anniversary special in 1983. Audiences sometimes confuse the two groups, given that they consist of identically dressed black men (five in the case of the Temptations) who sing in harmony and perform dance routines. But numbers tell the story: over the years there have been 21 Temptations, but only 6 Tops. And for the first 43 years, simply Mr. Fakir, Mr. Benson, Mr. Stubbs and Mr. Payton.
Mr. Fakir credits the quartet's closeness to the years they spent bouncing around the jazz club circuit. Leaving Detroit for New York, they shared a studio apartment and rotated three suits among them. (The Top with the most important appointment had first pick, Mr. Fakir said.)
The Tops toured with the jazz balladeer Billy Eckstine, who admonished them to forgo fancy dance steps until they had mastered their songs, as well as Count Basie and his orchestra. In 1963 they landed on the Jack Paar "Tonight" show, singing a jazz arrangement of "In the Still of the Night."
Watching in Detroit, Mr. Gordy instructed his staff to sign them up. By then the Tops were eager to trade the club scene for a label already known for generating hits, said Suzanne E. Smith, assistant professor at George Mason University and the author of "Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit."
But it took the Hollands and Mr. Dozier another year after that to concoct the Tops' first hit single, "Baby, I Need Your Lovin'," in 1964, and another year for the Tops to land their first No. 1 hit, "I Can't Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch)." Their second No. 1 hit, "Reach Out, I'll Be There," followed in 1966.
"We didn't know what bag to put them in," Mr. Dozier said by telephone from his home in Las Vegas. They concluded that Mr. Stubbs's plaintive voice should be most prominent, backed by the Tops' harmonies and layered with vocals by a female group, the Andantes.
Motown's choreographers and costume designers added to the presentation — "things they wouldn't have gotten" without joining Motown, Ms. Smith said.
Snappily dressed even offstage, the Tops liked to carouse in all corners of the globe. Mr. Dozier remembers 18-hour days that stretched until 3 a.m.
But relations with Motown grew strained by the early 70's, when Mr. Gordy took the label to Los Angeles. That was around the time Mr. Benson went in a decidedly un-Tops direction by writing the lyrics for "What's Goin' On," which Marvin Gaye recorded after revamping it with Al Cleveland. Gaye embraced the protest song over initial objections of Mr. Gordy, who doubted the tune would sell, Mr. Benson said.
Mr. Benson was inspired to write it after an afternoon in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. He was stunned, he said, when police descended on a crowd of hippies, pummeling them for no apparent reason.
After leaving Motown, the Tops scored occasional hits through the 1970's and 1980's, the last being "Indestructible," which reached No. 35 on the pop charts in 1988. Mr. Stubbs meanwhile became known to a new generation as the voice of a man-eating plant in the film version of "Little Shop of Horrors."
While its Motown hits sell tickets, Mr. Fakir said the Tops were always cycling newer material through their act, saving their biggest songs, like "Reach Out" for a show-ending medley. By that point familiar lyrics like "I'll be there, to always see you through" are a game saver in the event of an off night.
"They could be sick, they could be on crutches," he explains, but once the audience hears those words, "Wham! You've got 'em."
The decline of Mr. Stubbs and Mr. Payton's death are cautionary tales to Mr. Fakir and Mr. Benson, who have talked about retiring the Tops should one of them falter.
"We're not worried about ourselves, but we want people to enjoy it," Mr. Fakir said. He went on, "When things start to diminish, it's time to go home."
That prospect alarms Mr. Peoples and Mr. McNair, who separately insisted they would be willing to carry on the Tops' tradition. "This is history," Mr. Peoples said. "I just can't see people not having the option of going to see the Four Tops anymore."
Mr. McNair added: "It's not about who's up there. It's about the music."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company