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this or that efficiency method on the strength that it will save him money. Let us make him understand that he must do it if he loves his business, if he loves his home, if he loves his workers, if he loves his flag.’ With this spiel, the Charles Bedaux Company signed Campbell’s Soup, Gillette, Eastman Kodak, DuPont and Goodrich Rubber. Workers did not share their employers’ benevolent view of Bedaux. The American Federation of Labor claimed that his system, ‘stripped of its pseudo-technical verbiage, is nothing more than a method of forcing the last ounce of effort out of workers at the smallest possible cost in wages’. John L. Lewis’s rival Committee, later Congress, of Industrial Organizations called it ‘the most completely exhausting, inhuman “efficiency” system ever invented’. At a textile plant in Rhode Island and other factories, workers went on strike when management imposed his recommendations. With labour discontent and employer satisfaction, Bedaux’s fortunes increased.

The newly rich Bedaux jettisoned beauty queen Blanche Allen for socialite Fern Lombard. At 5 feet 11 inches, Fern stood 3½ inches taller than Bedaux. She was also several rungs higher on the social ladder. A native of Grand Rapids, Michigan, and a Christian Scientist, she was the child of a rich industrialist, belonged to the socially pretentious Daughters of the American Revolution and introduced Charles to millionaires with whom he now had a personal, rather than purely business, connection. Among them was ‘Colonel’ Archibald Rogers, whose property in upstate New York adjoined the Hyde Park estate of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the navy. Charles married Fern in 1917, the year he gained full US citizenship and the United States declared war on Germany. The next year, his first Charles Bedaux Company opened in Cleveland, Ohio. His ex-wife married another millionaire and moved to California with Charles Junior, whom Bedaux rarely saw during his childhood.

Charles and Fern moved to New York in 1920, living in suites that they furnished at the Plaza Hotel and then the Ritz. They also bought a large apartment on Fifth Avenue with a view over Central Park. His first offices were downtown at 17 Battery Place. Wherever he had a long-term consultancy, Bedaux rented a grand house nearby. He claimed later to have lived in twenty-four of the then forty-eight American states. He leased an estate in Marblehead, north of Boston, from the Crowninshield family, one of whom, Frank, edited Vanity Fair. The Paris-born Boston Brahmin Frank drew Bedaux into a fashionable and literary world that included Ernest Hemingway, Babe Ruth, financier Bernard Baruch, drama critic Alexander Woollcott and the beautiful playwright Clare Boothe. Bedaux became a figure in the speakeasies and nightclubs of Prohibition-era New York, where he indulged his erotic appetites. He kept an apartment in Greenwich Village for a succession of mistresses. Fern came to accept his infidelities so thoroughly that she brought women to him and occasionally took part in their trysts. ‘Men, women, children, and animals all found Bedaux attractive,’ wrote Janet Flanner, who thought he had a ‘worldly, boldly battered face, dominated by his fine, dark eyes.’ Bedaux, using his wavy brown hair to good effect, exuded Gallic charm, dressed in the finest flannel suits that his tailor could stitch and suavely smoked fifty cigarettes a day.

In 1924, Bedaux founded the Washington-Lafayette Institute to improve relations between the United States and France. He brought business and political contacts onto the board. Two members of President Calvin Coolidge’s cabinet, Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover and Postmaster General Harry New, belonged, as did the former commander of American forces in France, General John ‘Black Jack’ Pershing. The institute worked out of Bedaux’s company premises on Battery Place, until he moved his offices uptown to an oak-panelled storey of the new and more glamorous Chrysler Building.

The Bedauxs, who had no children together, thrived on adventure. No