Ugly Beauty

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by Ruth Brandon


  Success, however, created its own problems. Buyers at stores all over the country clamored for her lines, but if Helena Rubinstein products became available in every corner drugstore rather than through her salons, then half the selling value—the half that derived from their exclusivity—would be lost. If the customer paid top prices, she expected the personal attention that went with them. As the advertisements put it, “A visit to [Madame Rubinstein’s] sanctum or an inquiry by letter solves many a little heartache that may be due to some shortcoming in appearance. . . .” But Madame could not be everywhere at once, nor could she open a salon in every city in America. How, then, was her special brand of personal service to be maintained?

  The solution, she decided, was to set up mini-salons in leading department stores, staffed by specially trained and uniformed women and made worthwhile because the condition of being allowed to stock Helena Rubinstein products was that her whole range had to be carried. When a suitably substantial order was received, Helena or Manka or both would travel to the store to train the sales staff—the famous “Rubinstein ladies”—in the appropriate introduction, promotion, and sales techniques.

  “I did not realise what I was letting myself in for!” Madame wrote later. “At night we trained the assistants to be beauty consultants and teachers, giving them a sound knowledge of my preparations and their use, to be imparted to their assistants, and to customers. For eighteen out of the twenty-four hours we were either travelling between one city and another or actively working. We lived out of our suitcases like actresses in a theatrical touring company.”49 It was hard work, but she loved it. What better way to spend one’s life? As she put it, “My only recreation is work.”50 Then and always, it was the literal truth.

  Titus, meanwhile, was left holding the babies. “We were naturally very glad to hear from you and of your safe arrival. There is practically a little kindergarten class here,” he wrote her in the summer of 1919. The war had ended, and Madame had left for Europe to survey the remnants of her French and English businesses, leaving him in charge not just of Roy and Horace, now aged nine and seven, but Manka’s son, Johnnie, and a young cousin, Helena Silberfeld. “With a house so full of children it is difficult to have a little time to oneself.”51 As though she needed telling! Writing at midnight from Paris, where she had occupied a spare hour laying linoleum herself, she commented: “If Mr. Titus had been here I would not have made any progress whatsoever as he wouldn’t have allowed me to work.”52

  By 1924 Titus had had enough of this life. When he was unavailable, the boys were looked after by what their mother called “nice women”—the kind of impecunious ladies who in a previous age would have become governesses, and who, like governesses, were both better educated and cheaper than housekeepers, nurses, or maids.53 Leaving his sons to their uncertain care, he returned to Paris, his favorite city, where he would remain from then on. He had many old friends there, both from prewar days and from New York, which during the war had become a sort of Paris-in-exile.

  Artists such as Francis Picabia and the then little-known Marcel Duchamp, desperate to get away from war-torn Europe, had crossed the Atlantic in 1916 to find themselves American celebrities as a result of the great 1913 Armory Show of modern art. Lionized by wealthy collectors, they took their places at the center of a decadent, nihilistic, and blackly exhilarating whirl in which everyone desperately tried to block out what was happening across the Atlantic. But when the war ended, Paris became once more the center of art and excitement. The exiles returned, and Titus knew them all. With a mortgage from Helena’s property company Franc-Am Ltd., he opened a bookshop on rue Delambre. He sold rare books and manuscripts on the ground floor, and ran a small avant-garde publishing house, Black Manikin Press, catering to the anglophone colony, from the rooms above.

  Meanwhile, Madame was expanding her repertoire. She began to produce lipstick and other colored cosmetics and became interested, too, in plastic surgery and the famous (and soon to become infamous) monkey-gland extracts, both of which promised more tangible youthifying possibilities than water lily buds. Monkey glands had originally been the province of Dr. Serge Voronoff, who had observed that eunuchs aged faster than men still in possession of their balls and had concluded that grafting pieces of monkey testicle onto human testes might not only increase recipients’ potency but might also slow the aging process.7 By extension, he was now touting the possibility that grafting monkey ovaries onto women might produce similarly beneficial effects. A Dr. Kapp, whom Helena had met during her initial whirlwind tour of European skin specialists in 1905, and who had since been supplying her with creams and jellies, had become enthusiastic about this idea, and she was anxious to keep him on board. “Put down all sorts of imaginary things every month [i.e., as expenses] and I will take the money and pay Dr Kapp,” she instructed Rosa Hollay from New York in 1920. Mrs. Hollay was also to look out for potential surgery guinea pigs. “Do you know anyone who has a scab or a crooked nose or something?”54

  IV

  By 1928, Helena Rubinstein had become a New York institution. The opening of her new salon at 8 East Fifty-seventh Street, on the site of Collis P. Huntington’s old mansion, was marked by an article in The New Yorker, carefully orchestrated by Madame to enhance her reputation for ice-cool acumen and elegant eccentricity. Her original salon “ranked” (the article reported) “even then, as one of the finest of all such ateliers in New York.” But she wanted a better place, and one she owned rather than rented. The palace of the Southern Pacific Railway magnate Collis P. Huntington, recently deceased, caught her eye: she took it instantly, “without pausing to inquire just how many thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of dollars the building could cost. She saw to it later that it wouldn’t be too many. Madame is impulsive but canny. . . .” When the salon was finished, she told the interviewer, she had to spend three days in a sanitarium to recover. “Always after the opening of a new salon she has a nervous breakdown; she expects it and looks forward to it. It is part of her schedule.”55

  Decided, imperturbable, astute, elegant—such was the public Madame Rubinstein. Her most potent product, as she well knew, was herself. Eagerly scanning Helena Rubinstein’s advertisements, emblazoned as they invariably were with pictures of the eponymous founder—ageless, elegant, beholden to no man—women hoped that if they did as she advised, they might become as successful as she was. Salon patrons would often plead for some extra-special beauty cream not available to the general public. If the customer insisted, she would be sold an unlabeled jar for $50, with the whispered assurance that it was “Madame’s own cream.”56

  But beneath the visible surface seethed a quite different person, assailed by anxieties, doubts, fury, and hypochondria. She had created this vast sprawling empire (“There are remote cities which have Rubinstein agencies where there are not even Ford agencies,” Vanity Fair marveled); everyone depended upon her for instructions, for policy, above all for money; and yet she felt, at every moment, as though the whole laboriously constructed edifice might come tumbling down and she would find herself in poverty once more. Her favorite photographs showed her in her white coat in a laboratory, one of the great women scientists of the world engaged in a ceaseless search for more potent ingredients. But she knew, even if she did not choose to remember, that her vaunted medical studies amounted to a two-month tour of visits to selected practitioners. At any moment some prying journalist might find her out and expose her for a quack.

  One solut
ion to these constant worries—the solution favored by Titus—was to bow out, sell her business, and live on the proceeds. Eventually the temptation was too much, and on December 11, 1928, Lehman Brothers acquired the American arm of Helena Rubinstein. It netted Madame, who retained the European and Australian interests, a cool $7,300,000—over $84 million today. All her worries should have been at an end.

  On the contrary, they got worse. Deprived of the work that had taken up the greater part of her time, she was bored and frustrated. Impotent to intervene, she had to watch as Leh-man’s sales strategy, which she had endorsed—to expand into a more mid-range market—came unstuck in the wake of the 1929 Wall Street crash. The upmarket end of the trade was unaffected. In fact, sales rose: the first example of the now well-documented “lipstick effect,” in which, during hard times, women who otherwise would have bought an expensive outfit buy a nice lipstick instead.8 But lower-priced items did less well, and the new range of mass-market goods tainted Helena Rubinstein’s upmarket outlets by association. “I knew that they would make a mess of it,” she told Patrick O’Higgins. “What do bankers know about the beauty business? Except that it can make money for them. After they bought me out they tried to go mass; to sell my products in every grocery store. Pfft! The idea wasn’t bad. But the timing was all wrong.”57

  In October 1930, she became ill—struck with appendicitis in Vienna, Titus said. But this was no mere appendicitis. The following May found her still confined to bed at her sister Ceska’s London flat, and boiling with frustration. Ironically, Titus, for the first time in his life, was enjoying considerable professional success. In the spring of 1929 his Black Manikin Press published D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which went into three printings within a year. And in 1930 he published another smash hit, the English translation of Kiki’s Memoirs. Kiki was Man Ray’s mistress, and her racy tale came with embellishments by the Montparnasse Americans—saucy photos by Man Ray, and an introduction by Ernest Hemingway. Admittedly, Helena was fabulously wealthy and Titus still relied on her subventions, but for the first time in their married life, with Helena on a low and Titus doing well, the balance tilted his way.

  When she fell ill, Titus was kind and attentive, frequently coming over to visit her in London. After all the years of quarrels and separations, was it possible that their marriage might yet be salvaged? They were both over sixty, he pointed out—retirement age, when people think of drawing a pension and putting their feet up. The Lehman deal had given Helena more money than even she could ever spend. Wasn’t it time to relax a little?

  Depressed by this prospect, she hatched a new plan. The combination of the financial downturn and Lehman’s mishandling meant that shares in Helena Rubinstein, Inc., had sunk from $60 to $3. Why not try to buy back control? She could set the business on its feet again, and still be left with a healthy profit. Some of her old board members still remained in place. One of them slipped her a list of shareholders—mostly women—and she wrote to every one, explaining how the business’s only chance of survival lay in restoring it to the hands of its creator and convincing them to let her use their proxy votes. Meanwhile she bought whatever shares came on the market, building up a considerable holding.

  The whole process had to be conducted discreetly, and for a while it was uncertain whether or not it would succeed. A letter from Titus during this edgy period shows that he, for one, hoped it would not. “Look here, outside of your wounded pride, which is not a wound that can be healed, if you do not win, you will gain something more valuable,” he wrote.

  You have two fine boys, whom you do not enjoy possessing, you have a husband if you would only once begin to really believe in him, who loves you truly and sincerely, whatever his faults are, you finally have yourself, to whom you have never, never given a real chance. These are the only things that substantially matter. The children’s life, your life and mine, the combined life of the four of us. Everything else are only things, just things. . . .58

  Vain hopes! Things, as he should have known, were all that mattered to Helena. An expenditure of $1.5 million, combined with the proxies, netted majority control. Madame was in the saddle once more, with a net profit of $6 million after the sale and buyback. Lehman’s furiously issued a communiqué denouncing this brilliant maneuver as “financially illiterate,” but she had trounced them handsomely, and recovered her health and happiness in the process. “Ahead of me once more was the lonely treadmill of work,” she sighed in her memoir.59 And with that, miraculously restored, she sailed for New York.

  [1] The title of this chapter is taken from a Helena Rubinstein advertisement that appeared in Australian Home Journal in 1907.

  [2] Even today this domestic bias still holds good—arguably, the two most successful contemporary female entrepreneurs are Martha Stewart, with her multimillion-dollar homecrafts empire, and Anita Roddick, with her comparably successful Body Shop chain, both of which began, as it were, at the kitchen table.

  [3]These prices are in shillings and pence: three shillings and sixpence, five shillings and sixpence, sixpence. There were twenty shillings in a pound and twelve pence in a shilling.

  [4] Similarly, when writer Michael Greenberg was trying to make a living selling discount cosmetics in the Bronx, he found that if the price was too low—say, $3.50—customers got suspicious. When he raised the price to $5, business picked up. (See Greenberg’s Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer’s Life.)

  [5] This figure is arrived at using the retail price index—what the equivalent money would buy. But this is only one of several ways of calculating comparative monetary worth. Using, for example, average earnings, the figure would be more like $61.3 million. See http://www.measuringworth.com/ukcompare/result.php#.

  [6] A male writer, trying out skin creams in 2010 for the purposes of an article, confirmed this potent effect. “After a few weeks of my trial . . . a habit has formed, and I find myself using the creams and potions without question. I still don’t believe my skin looks different . . . but . . . it’s not really about skin at all, it’s about self-perception. Using skincare products every day starts to become worthwhile largely because I know they are expensive; like most of us I have been conditioned to associate well-being with expenditure, and I feel—against my better judgment—as if I am experiencing luxury.” (Michael Hann, “Spot the Difference,” Guardian, January 25, 2010.)

  [7] A cocktail called the Monkey Gland still reminds us of this bizarre (though in its day highly popular) fad. The ingredients are:

  1 ounce gin

  1 ounce orange juice

  1 dash grenadine

  1 dash anise (probably originally absinthe; Pernod or Benedictine are often substituted now)

  [8] This effect was seen in New York after the 2001 terrorist attacks, and again during the winter of 2008–9, a time of deep recession, when lipstick sales rose as much as 20 percent, year-on-year. (“Red Alert: Lipstick Wars Are Coming,” Observer, January 17, 2010.)

  Chapter Two

  The Authoritarian

  I

  When people say at a dinner-party, “You’re so lucky to be in cosmetics!” I say, “Yes, but you had to realize that in 1907.”

  —LILIANE BETTENCOURT-SCHUELLER, 1987

  Rue Saint-Honoré, whe
re Helena Rubinstein opened her first Paris salon in 1908, is one of Paris’s most glamorous thoroughfares. But the backstreets that surround it are dark and dingy. Among the least prepossessing is a little corridor, called rue d’Alger, that links rue Saint-Honoré with rue de Rivoli. It was here, however, while Madame bustled about installing her stock and arranging couches and curtains in her new boutique, that the true revolution in cosmetics was taking shape. At the back of number 4’s dim courtyard a young chemist named Eugène Schueller had rented a two-room mezzanine to serve as a combination of laboratory, bedroom, and kitchen. He was working to isolate the world’s first safe artificial hair dye, and by the time Rubinstein opened her salon, he was almost there. For more than two years he had worked night and day, watching his savings diminish, cooking his food on the Bunsen burner he used for his chemical experiments. Finally he established his formula. He gave it the provisional name L’Auréole, after a hairstyle popular in 1905, the year he had begun his researches. Soon he would change this name to L’Oréal. Eighty years later, his company would swallow Madame’s.

  Like Helena Rubinstein, Eugène Schueller entered the beauty business at the optimum moment, when the market was ready but still untapped. Like her, it would make him rich. Like her, he spoke to the universal fear of aging, to every woman’s dread of wrinkles and grey hairs. But in every other respect, they, like their products, were utterly different.

 

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