Richard L. Gelb

Richard L. Gelb did not found Bristol-Myers, and he was not even sure he wanted to work there. He arrived in 1959 as a condition of the deal in which the company bought Clairol, the hair-color business his parents had built, and he came reluctantly, a son obliged to mind the family's largest asset inside someone else's corporation ^[1][2]. Over the next thirty-five years he made the corporation his own, first by running Clairol so well that he was pulled upstairs, then by seizing the top job in 1972 when Bristol-Myers had stumbled, and finally by engineering one of the largest mergers in the history of the pharmaceutical industry ^[2][3][6].

When Gelb became chairman and chief executive in 1972, Bristol-Myers was a consumer-products company in trouble: a string of new-product failures in the late 1960s had drained its cash and depressed its stock ^[2][6]. His response was not retreat but two simultaneous bets. He poured roughly $400 million into advertising the brands that worked, Bufferin, Excedrin, Ban, Clairol, defending the cash-generating toiletries and over-the-counter franchises that funded everything else ^[2][6]. And he steadily tilted the company toward ethical pharmaceuticals and medical devices, buying the orthopedics maker Zimmer in 1972 and the dental-products firm Unitek in 1978, while building research muscle around the Mead Johnson nutritional and drug business the company had acquired in 1967 ^[2][6].

The pivot took two decades, but it culminated in a single stroke. In July 1989 Gelb and his longtime friend Richard M. Furlaud, chief executive of the venerable Squibb Corporation, announced a roughly $12 billion stock-swap merger of their two companies ^[4][5]. The deal created Bristol-Myers Squibb, with combined annual sales approaching $9 billion and pharmaceutical revenue above $4 billion, at a stroke the second-largest drug company on earth, trailing only Merck ^[4][5][7]. Gelb became chairman and chief executive of the combined enterprise; Furlaud became president and ran the pharmaceutical business ^[4][5]. The fit was unusually clean: Squibb brought the blockbuster cardiovascular drug Capoten and a strong European presence, Bristol-Myers brought cancer and consumer franchises and deep U.S. distribution ^[5][6].

The years that followed validated the bet. Under the merged company Bristol-Myers Squibb brought to market a remarkable run of medicines: Pravachol for cholesterol (FDA approval 1991), the AIDS drug Videx/ddI (1991), and above all Taxol, the ovarian- and breast-cancer agent originally derived from the bark of the Pacific yew, cleared by the FDA in the early 1990s ^[6][7][9]. By the end of 1993, the last full year of Gelb's tenure as chief executive, worldwide revenues reached about $11.4 billion ^[6][7]. Taxol would become one of the best-selling cancer drugs in the world, and the company's pharmaceutical pipeline became its center of gravity, exactly the transformation Gelb had spent a career engineering ^[6][7].

Gelb's standing in the industry rested less on a single invention than on temperament: a reputation for steadiness, ethics, and the long view in a business prone to hype. Harvard Business School, naming him among its 20th-century business leaders, credited him with redirecting Bristol-Myers away from personal care toward pharmaceuticals and delivering "stellar financial returns and extraordinary growth" ^[8]. He stepped down as chief executive at the end of 1993 and as chairman in 1995, handing the company to Charles A. Heimbold Jr.; the corporation honored him by naming its Wallingford, Connecticut, research campus the Richard L. Gelb Center for Pharmaceutical Research and Development ^[3][6].

He was also, in the New York manner of his generation of executives, a civic figure as much as a corporate one, vice chairman of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, a director of The New York Times Company and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and a co-founder of the New York City Police Foundation ^[1][3]. Diagnosed with cancer in 1986, he ran one of the world's great cancer-drug companies for years while privately fighting the disease, and he died of it in 2004 ^[1][2].

Richard Lee Gelb was born on June 8, 1924, in New York City, the eldest son of Lawrence M. Gelb, a chemist and entrepreneur, and Joan Gelb (professionally, Joan Clair) ^[1][2]. The family fortune was a bottle. In 1931 Lawrence and Joan founded Clairol after Lawrence encountered a one-step hair-coloring formulation in France; the company's name fused Joan's professional name with the word "oil," and over two decades it transformed American hair color from a furtive vice into a mass consumer product ^[1][2]. Richard grew up inside that business and its marketing, the family enterprise that would later carry his name into the boardroom of a far larger company.

He was educated at Phillips Academy in Andover, then Yale University, and then Harvard Business School, the standard finishing sequence of the mid-century corporate elite ^[1][2]. At Yale he studied science before turning toward economics; at Harvard he absorbed the disciplines of advertising, manufacturing, and finance that would define his management style ^[2]. He came of age during the Second World War and entered the family company after his schooling, learning the toiletries trade from the inside as Clairol grew into the dominant force in American hair coloring ^[1][2].

The hinge of his life was 1959. Bristol-Myers, then primarily a maker of toiletries and household and over-the-counter products, acquired Clairol, and acquired, as part of the bargain, the founder's capable son ^[1][2]. Gelb stayed on to run the Clairol division and was named a director of Bristol-Myers in 1960 ^[1][3]. He had not sought a career inside a large diversified corporation; he had inherited one. But he proved so effective at running Clairol that he was promoted to executive vice president and then, in 1967, to president of the whole company under chairman Gavin K. MacBain, the launching point for the turnaround he would lead five years later ^[2][6].

The company Richard Gelb left behind was the inverse of the one he joined. He inherited a maker of deodorant and hair dye and bequeathed the world's second-largest pharmaceutical enterprise, anchored by Taxol, Pravachol, Capoten, and a research engine that the 1989 Squibb merger had given the scale to sustain ^[5][6][7]. Harvard Business School lists him among the century's notable business leaders precisely for that redirection, away from personal care, toward medicine, and for the "stellar financial returns" that accompanied it ^[8]. The Richard L. Gelb Center for Pharmaceutical Research and Development in Wallingford, Connecticut, carried his name on the very function he had spent his career enlarging ^[3].

His legacy also carries a shadow that arrived after he left. In the early 2000s, under later management, Bristol-Myers Squibb was caught inflating sales through "channel stuffing" and improper accounting, settling fraud charges for $150 million in 2004, the year Gelb died ^[2]. The contrast sharpened the memory of his own reputation for probity: a former employee, in his obituary's guest book, called him "the best and most respected CEO BMS has ever had" ^[1]. Beyond the company, Gelb's civic life, Memorial Sloan-Kettering, the New York City Police Foundation he co-founded, board seats at The New York Times Company and the New York Fed, embodied a now-rarer model of the chief executive as steward of his city as well as his shareholders ^[1][3]. Having quietly battled cancer from 1986 while running a great cancer-drug company, he died of it in 2004, at seventy-nine ^[1][2].