Burt’s Buzz

“A good day is when no one shows up, and you don’t have to go anywhere,” says Ingram Berg Shavitz of Maine. Instantly recognizable as the hippie with the railroad cap on a billion tins and tubes of lip balm, the man known to acquaintances and strangers simply as Burt balances the low-tech, no-frills rural existence he’s long embraced and a paid gig as the face of a multimillion-dollar brand. What a long, strange trip it’s been for the middle-class Jewish kid who ditched a colorful career as a New York City photojournalist in the ‘60s for the laid-back life of an upstate “high-class hobo.” Burt gravitated to beekeeping, happily subsisting on roadside sales of honey until he met the love of his life. She expanded Burt’s Bees into hand-dipped candles and, in due course, an entire product line distinguished by eye-catching packaging and savvy mythologizing of Burt’s back-to-nature ethos. Burt’s Buzz delves, somewhat reluctantly, into the messy, mysterious disposition of the relationship and the company that left Burt, to this day, reconciling the life he wanted with the life thrust upon him. Even for a guy who doesn’t own a TV—or a functioning hot-water heater—celebrity has its allure. —Michael Fox