NEW YORK — Joseph Spellman, who wielded a sharp wit and sunny disposition as well as a mercurial marketing mind as a longtime executive at the Estée Lauder Cos. Inc. and Elizabeth Arden, died Tuesday at age 71.
Spellman died at 1:30 pm. at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan, according to his longtime assistant Sharon Myerson. The cause of death was apparently from complications stemming from pancreatic cancer. He was diagnosed with the disease on May 19, underwent surgery during the summer, went home, then returned to the hospital about a week ago.
“He was the best ever,” said his wife Victoria.
“He was so optimistic about the results and his ability to recover from this dreaded disease,” said longtime friend Gilbert W. Harrison, chairman and founder of Financo Inc.
Related Articles
Looking back on Spellman’s career in the beauty industry, Harrison said, “He loved the interaction. His talent was enormous; his contacts were enormous, and he loved the people he was working with everyday.”
You May Also Like
“At the end of the day, he was one of the architects of the modern beauty industry,” said John Demsey, a group president of the Estee Lauder Cos., who worked with Spellman for the last decade. “Whether working alongside Estée Lauder, or Leonard Lauder, or Charles Revson or Elizabeth Arden — he was there on the ground floor. He was a brilliant marketer.”
Demsey also said he will miss Spellman’s infectious personality. “No matter what the day would bring, whenever I saw Joe, I could count on a kiss and a hug. That was Joe Spellman. We called him ‘The Cardinal.’ If Joe had known that he had passed as the Pope was coming to New York, he would have seen the humor in that.”
Early in his career, Spellman was a prime creative force in the resuscitation of Elizabeth Arden, which one retailer then called “a sleepy old line that catered to old ladies.”
For the past decade or so, Spellman worked as a senior consultant at Lauder. He would step in and temporarily take the helm of a brand whenever a general manager left. “He made everyone work well together,” Myerson recalled. “He just wanted the brand to succeed. He never wanted to be president.”
His work at Arden started in 1988, and reached a high point in the Nineties with the launch of the blockbuster hit fragrance Elizabeth Taylor’s White Diamonds, which became one of Arden’s biggest franchises and is still a perennial hot seller during promotional holiday periods. It is still viewed in the industry as a touch stone of the celebrity fragrance genre. Spellman later would say that White Diamonds was conceived as the trailer to a movie that Taylor never made.
Even products that did not survive the sales ranking wars, such as Lip Spa lipstick — the Spa skin-care product that was the first to use vitamins — and an accessibly priced Sun Flowers fragrance were considered groundbreaking. Spellman also was involved in the development of technological breakthroughs, like Arden’s mainstay Ceramide Time Complex Capsules.
Before joining Arden, Spellman worked for 12 years at his own marketing and creative design firm.
In the Seventies, he worked at Estée Lauder, where he rose to vice president of marketing.
A memorial service is being planned. In addition to his wife, Spellman is survived by a daughter, Chloe, and son, Luke.