Victor Kiam

Victor Kermit Kiam, businessman: born New Orleans 12 December 1926; president, Benrus Corporation 1968-71, chairman, president and chief executive officer 1971-77; chairman and chief executive, Remington Products 1979-2001; chairman, Ronson 1998-2001; married 1956 Ellen Lipscher (one son, two daughters); died Stamford, Connecticut 27 May 2001

Victor Kermit Kiam, businessman: born New Orleans 12 December 1926; president, Benrus Corporation 1968-71, chairman, president and chief executive officer 1971-77; chairman and chief executive, Remington Products 1979-2001; chairman, Ronson 1998-2001; married 1956 Ellen Lipscher (one son, two daughters); died Stamford, Connecticut 27 May 2001.

I liked the shaver so much, I bought the company." The shaver was a Remington, the line would become one of the advertising catchphrases of the 1980s, and the speaker, Victor Kiam, was indubitably the only corporate boss in history who plugged the merits of his product dressed in nothing but a bath-towel.

But then Kiam, among the most innovative of all US business leaders, was in his bones a salesman. And, as every salesman knows, a pitch above all has to have the ring of truth. In its first incarnation, the Remington ad featured Kiam in a suit. Deeming that unrealistic, he performed the commercial in a bathrobe, only to discover that most American men didn't wear a bathrobe when they shaved. So a towel it was. As Kiam related in a speech accepting the 1988 Outstanding Business Leader award, "I draped a towel over my shoulder and covered one breast, as two breasts would have been too much for the American public."

That idiosyncratic judgement was triumphantly correct. Remington, thanks in no small measure to those ads, became a textbook business turnaround story of the 1980s. When Kiam bought it from Sperry Corporation, Remington was a loss-making company which employed 428 people. Less than a decade later, its workforce had expanded to 2,500 and, with 43 per cent of the market, it was America's dominant electric razor manufacturer; and ­ sweetest irony of all ­ until he bought it in one of the first leveraged buyouts in US business history, Kiam had been a wet-shave man.

Kiam's career blended the conventional and unconventional in equal measure. His home town was New Orleans, breeding ground of jazzmen and corrupt politicians but not of corporate CEOs. His parents divorced when he was three and he was brought up by his grandparents, getting his first taste of business by selling cold Coca-Cola on the city streets during the steamy Deep South summers.

But, after navy service in the closing years of the Second World War, Kiam climbed straight up the orthodox ladder of the aspiring executive: Yale, a spell at the Sorbonne to acquaint himself with foreign parts, then to Harvard for a business master's degree in 1948.

After joining Lever Bros he worked as a cosmetics salesman in Cleveland, Ohio (which, he later remarked, "Lever regarded as foreign parts"). In 1955 he joined the bra manufacturer Playtex, and became vice-president of marketing and president of the company's sarong division, before leaving to take control of Benrus, a maker of exclusive watches. Benrus gave the first glimpse of Kiam's ability to revive a fading business. At Remington that talent blossomed remarkably.

With the help of $500,000 of his own money, Kiam put together a $25m package to buy Remington in 1979. He transformed the place almost overnight, firing 70 executives in a single day soon after he arrived, introducing a low-cost electric razor for $19.95 and turning chronic losses into a $4m profit in his first year. Soon Remington was a thriving, diversified company, offering such devices as the Fuzz-Away lint remover and a nose-hair clipper.

But Kiam's next venture was less successful. In 1988 he bought the New England Patriots football team, reckoning its muscled he-men would be a useful plug for the Remington brand. But the he-men ran amok, and his spell as an NFL owner was most famous for a 1990 locker-room incident in which one of its players exposed himself to a female sports reporter of The Boston Herald. The affair provoked a classic American gender war, and a boycott of Kiam-owned products. The sports writer sued Kiam, the team manager and three players for sexual harassment in a case which was eventually settled out of court. Two years later, he sold the loss-making and tarnished Patriots to a St Louis businessman, James Orthwein.

By then, however, Kiam had long become a US corporate institution. He possessed charm, international savvy and street-wise wit not usually associated with American boardrooms. He was in constant demand as a keynote speaker and published two best-sellers on entrepreneurial risk-taking, Going for It (1986) and Live to Win! (1989).

In 1995 he decided to retire, but the gentle life of bridge tournaments and seniors' tennis in Florida was not for Kiam. He remained chairman of a dozen companies, among them Remington and a new British acquisition, Ronson.

That episode led to a last victory, in the London libel courts in March 2000. The Mirror's infamous City Slickers column had proclaimed that the Ronson deal showed he had lost his touch. Kiam sued and won £105,000 in damages, plus costs. The issue wasn't money, he said, but principle. "Everything was wrong," he said. "When that article ran we had straightened everything out, but the Mirror said I was about to close everything down." The sense of grievance however soon disappeared, as Kiam jestfully improvised on the line that had made him world- famous: "I liked the verdict so much I wish I could have bought the jury."

Rupert Cornwell